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PHILOSOPHY 
OF THE RECENT PAST 











PHILOSOPHY 
OF THE RECENT PAST 


AN OUTLINE OF EUROPEAN AND 
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY SINCE 1860 


BY i 
RALPH BARTON PERRY 


PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 


CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON 
ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 


CopyriGcat, 1926, By 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 





Printed in the United States of America 





PREFACE 


This book is intended as an introduction to the 
philosophy which has lately established its place in the 
record of mankind. To deal both comprehensively and 
justly with strictly contemporary thought is an im- 
possible task. If I have seemed to slight many notable 
living philosophers, this does not imply that I regard 
them as unimportant, but only that I hesitate to an- 
ticipate the verdict of history. 

I have aimed to set forth each philosophy with sym- 
pathetic understanding, rather than to argue my own 
opinion about it. I hope that through this brief ex- 
position, and through the many references to their 
works, my readers may find an access to the philos- 
ophers themselves—including philosophers of conti- 
nental Europe as well as of English-speaking countries. 


RALPH BARTON PERRY. 
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. 













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CONTENTS 


Part I. Tue Strate or Puitosornyy in 1860 


ST, 
§ 2. 
§ 3. 
§ 4. 
§ 5. 


Part II. 


§ 6. 
§ 7. 
§ 8. 
§ 9. 
§ 10. 
§ 11. 


§ 12. 
§ 13. 


Part III. 


§ 14. 
§ 15. 


§ 16. 
§ 17. 


Germany 

Italy . 

France 

Great Britain 

America. . 

NATURALISM, MATERIALISM, AND Post- 
TIVISM 

Darwin and Darwinism 

Cosmic Evolution. Spencer . 

Monism of Substance. Haeckel . 

The Rise of Positivism. Comte. 

Empirical Positivism. Mill . 


Economical Positivism. Lange. Mach. 
Poincaré . 


Sociological Positivism. Durkheim . 


The Influence of Recent Science . 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 


Spiritualism in Germany. Fechner. Lotze. 
Hartmann eizusy CaP act LIM 8 


Spiritualism in France. Maine de Biran. 
Cousin. Ravaisson. Boutroux 


Idealism in France. Renouvier. Lachelier . 


Idealism in England. Green. aye Bo- 
sanquet , 
vii 


PAGE 


12 
16 


20 
29 
38 
43 
52 


60 
71 
79 


81 


97 
113 


126 


vill 
§ 18. Idealism in America. Royce. Howison. 
Bowne : hye pee 
§ 19. Critical Idealism in Lo ieune Cohen. Na- 
torp ‘ ‘ 
§ 20. Ethical and Cultural Idealism in eae 
Windelband. Rickert. naa Eucken. 
Simmel 
§ 21. The New Idealism in Habe Croce. Gentile 
Part IV. VuiraLisM, VOLUNTARISM, AND PRAGMATISM 
§ 22. The Will to Power. Nietzsche 
§ 23. The Impulse to Life. Bergson 
§ 24. Catholic Modernism. Le Roy 
§ 25. Pragmatism and the Will to Believe. James. 
Peirce. Dewey. Schiller. Vaihinger . 
Part V. THe RevivaL or REALISM 
§ 26. The Reaction against Idealism 
§ 27. Neo-Thomism . 
§ 28. Realism in Germany. Meinong. Husserl 
§ 29. Realism in England and America. Russell. 
Moore. Alexander. Santayana. White- 
head pO lie al Oe gree 
CONCLUSION 
§ 30. Tendencies of the Immediate Present 


CONTENTS 


SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY . 


INDEX 


PAGE 


136 


145 


151 
160 


168 
174 
183 


186 


197 
201 
205 


211 


221 


224 
227 


PHILOSOPHY 
OF THE RECENT PAST 


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PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT 
PAST 


PAk Ly | 
THE STATE OF PHILOSOPHY IN 1860 


Schopenhauer, the last representative of the great 
metaphysical movement inspired directly by the criti- 
cal philosophy of Kant, died in 1860. A cross-section 
of European and American philosophy in the years im- 
mediately before and after this date reveals both the 
diversity and diffusion of the post-Kantian metaphys- 
ics itself, and the rise of the great rival movement which 
was to dispute its control during the latter half of the 
nineteenth century. 

The metaphysical impulse communicated by Kant 
moved in two divergent directions. In his recognition 
of the thing-in-itself behind appearances, in his provi- 
sion under the form of faith for God, freedom, and im- 
mortality, and in his qualified assent to a purposive and 
esthetic interpretation of nature, he encouraged the re- 
vival of a spzritualistic realism after the manner of 
Leibniz. In his doctrine of the organizing and creative 
activity of the knowing mind, through its forms of sen- 
sibility, its categories of understanding, and its ideals of 
reason, he founded modern idealism. Each of these va- 
rieties of post-Kantian metaphysics proved capable of 
great diversification in the course of their later history 


both in Germany and abroad. The rival movement was 
1 


2 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


naturalism, or the philosophy inspired by the progress 
of the physical sciences. This influence of science on 
philosophy took two forms, according as attention was 
directed to the content of science or to its form. Mate- 
rialism adapted the content of physics to the purposes 
of metaphysics, or employed particular scientific the- 
ories, such as the conservation of matter and force, or 
evolution, as an account of reality. Posztiism, on the . 
other hand, was primarily concerned with the method — 
of science, holding that science alone provided genuine 
knowledge. This unique cognitive success of science 
was attributed by some to its close adherence to the 
facts of experience, and by others to its descriptive tech- 
nic and satisfaction of human needs. The first of these 
interpretations of scientific knowledge furnished the 
motive of empirical positivism, and was peculiarly con- 
genial to the tradition of English thought; the second 
constituted the motive of economical positivism, and 
was relatively characteristic of Germany and France. 
Naturalism of both varieties turned human hope and 
aspiration away from the supernatural world and fo- 
cussed them upon man and soczety. Hence the growth 
of naturalism was accompanied by the scientific study 
of society (sociology), and by the formulation of pro- 
orammes of social reform. 


§1. Germany 


When we turn to the state of German philosophy in 
or about the year 1860, its most notable characteristic 
is undoubtedly the rise of naturalism. This was in 
part a development within the reigning metaphysical 


PHILOSOPHY IN 1860 3 


schools. The internal controversy among the Hegelians 
arose from the general prominence at this time of the 
issue between philosophy and established religion. Da- 
vip Srrauss,! the leader of the “left” or liberal wing 
of the Hegelian school, reduced the orthodox dogmas 
to myths, and contended that the only religion con- 
sistent with a strict interpretation of Hegel’s teachings 
was a naturalistic pantheism. Lupwia FrEvERBACH? 
contended that, in view of Hegel’s rejection of creation, 
providence, immortality, and free-will, it could not be 
justly claimed that he gave philosophical support to 
popular spiritualism and religious orthodoxy. As his 
thought developed, Feuerbach identified himself closely 
with the scientific view of the world, and construed re- 
ligion as only the imaginative projection of human 
needs and hopes.’ This tendency of naturalism to sub- 
stitute human and social for supernatural values is 
most conspicuously represented among Hegelians by 
Kart Marx,* whose famous book on Capital (Das Ka- 


1In his famous Leben Jesu (1835). His most important later writings 
were Die christliche Glaubenslehre (1840-1841) and Der alte und der neue 
Glaube (1872). He has an important place in the history of the philos- 
ophy of religion and of biblical criticism. 

21804-1872. The greatest of his works is the Wesen des Christen- 
thums, 1841. His Grundsdize der Philosophie der Zukunft appeared in 
1843, the Theogonie in 1857, and the Gott, Fretheit und Unsterblichkeit in 
1866. 

The other important representatives of this group were Arnold Ruge 
(1802-1880) and Bruno Bauer (1809-1882). The extreme development 
of Feuerbach’s anthropological ethics and religion is represented by the 
revolutionary individualism of @aspar Schmidt (1806-1856), commonly 
known under his pseudonym of Max Stirner. His Der Einzige und sein 
Eigenthum (1845) has had great popular vogue. 

3 Feuerbach was the author of the famous dictum, cited at this time 
as the quintessence of the crassest materialism, that ‘‘man is what he 
eats” (Man ist was er isst). 

41818-1883. 


4 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


pital) was published in 1867, and became the bible of 
modern socialism. Marx adopted Hegel’s historical 
method and his emphasis on dialectic, construing the 
former in terms of economic development and the lat- 
ter in terms of class conflict. 

Strauss, Feuerbach, and Marx illustrate the material- 
istic trend, toward 1860, of Hegelianism, the greatest of 
the post-Kantian metaphysical schools. But there was 
also a strong naturalistic motive in Kant himself which 
had been overruled by his idealistic followers, and which 
was now revived. Although Kant gave no encourage- 
ment to materialism, his Critique of Pure Reason, 
strictly construed, and separated from the Critique of 
Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment, could be 
cited as an indorsement of positivism; since it set forth 
the view that science alone fulfils the requirements of 
knowledge, as uniting the forms of intuition and the 
categories of the understanding with the data of experi- 
ence. Hence, in the 1860’s, German positivism, as rep- 
resented by Albert Lange and Otro Lizpmann, adopted 
the shibboleth “Back to Kant,” + and appealed to the 
master against his disciples. These thinkers regarded 
Kant as untrue to his own insight in so far as by his 
recognition of the thing-in-itself he encouraged the re- 
vival of dogmatic metaphysics, and they proposed to 
limit philosophy to the critical examination of the pre- 


1 This exhortation (Also muss auf Kant zurtickgegangen werden!) ap- 
peared at the close of each chapter of Liebmann’s Kant und die Epigonen 
(1865). Liebmann was born in 1840 and died in 1912. Lange (§ 11) 
published his important History of Materialism in 1866. With the name 
of Lange should be: associated that of Eugen Dihring (1833-1921), 
whose Natdrliche Dialektuk appeared in 1865. 


PHILOSOPHY IN 1860 5 


suppositions of science. They thus furnished a connect- 
ing link between a positivistic naturalism, and the 
strict Kantianism which came to be known as neo- 
criticism or critical idealism. 

But while German naturalism may be said to have 
sprung in part from within the Kantian movement it- 
self, it received its chief impetus at this time from the 
achievements of science. Although naturalism is in- 
spired by science, it undertakes to satisfy the philo- 
sophical demand for a comprehensive view of the world, 
and is therefore influenced by the generalizations of sci- 
ence, rather than by its particular items. Modern nat- 
uralism had up to this time appealed mainly in the 
mechanical theory originated by Galileo and perfected 
by Newton. But in the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
tury the most impressive scientific generalization was 
that of conservation, or the quantitative constancy of 
both matter and force (or energy) in all their diverse 
qualitative manifestations. The principle of the con- 
servation of matter had been established by LAVOISIER, 
the founder of modern chemistry.2 The principle of the 
conservation of energy was not generally accepted until 
the year 1860, as a result of the work of Mayzr, JOULE, 
and Heitmuouz.? The combination of these two prin- 

1§ 19. 

* Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a Frenchman and a vic- 
tim of the Revolution. 

* Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1874) announced his conclusions in 1842. 
In his Die organische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem Stoff- 
wechsel (1845) he combined the principle of the conservation of energy 
with that of matter, in their application to vital processes. James Pres- 
cott Joule (1818-1889), an Englishman, announced his conclusions in 


1843. Hermann L. F. von Helmholz (1821-1895) published his Uber die 
Erhaltung der Kraft in 1847. These scientists together with the Danish 


6 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


ciples suggested a new type of philosophical monism, in 
which nature was regarded as a fixed amount of ener- 
gized matter proceeding in a ceaseless and circular round 
of change. Life and mind were regarded as parts of this 
closed system, the organism being one of the forms as- 
sumed by matter, and consciousness one of the forms 
assumed by energy. The most important exposition of 
this thesis was contained in Mouescuortr’s Circulation 
of Life (Der Kreislauf des Lebens), published in 1852, and 
it acquired great popular vogue through BUCHNER’s 
Force and Matter (Kraft und Stoff), of which sixteen 
editions appeared in Germany between 1855 and 
1889.1 The bitter controversy to which this move- 
ment gave rise was due to its uncompromising denial 
both of Christian orthodoxy and of common-sense 
spiritualism.? 

The counterclaims of spiritualism were championed 
in Germany at this time by the “right” wing of the 
Hegelian school, and by the so-called ‘‘semi-Hegelians”’ 


physicist Colding and the German physicist Mohr appear to have 
reached their conclusions independently, and their rival claims to prior- 
ity are still a matter of controversy. The English physicist based his 
conclusions on experimental research, while the Continental physicists 
were more influenced by general philosophical considerations, such as 
the axiom of the equality of cause and effect (causa xquat effectum). 
The new principle must also be viewed as the logical outcome of earlier 
developments in physics. It is peculiarly an idea of the times, rather 
than of any single individual. 

1 Jacob Moleschott (1822-1893); Louis Biichner (1824-1899). Other 
leading members of this school were Karl Vogt (1817-1895) and Hein- 
rich Czolbe (1819-1873). Ernst Haeckel (§ 70) continued this tradition, 
but was distinguished as belonging to a later period by the shift of 
emphasis from the principle of conservation to that of evolution, result- 
ing from the influence of Darwin. 

? As illustrated, for example, by Moleschott’s famous saying: ‘‘No 
phosphorus, no thought”’ (Ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke). 


PHILOSOPHY IN 1860 7 


who sought to correct Hegel and to develop a philosoph- 
ical basis for theism.' But it is a striking fact that the 
great leaders of the anti-naturalistic movement did not 
draw their inspiration mainly from Kantian idealism. 
They were not primarily concerned with the ideality of 
nature, or its dependence on mind through the act of 
knowledge, but, rather, with the immanence of mind in 
nature. They were, in short, spiritual realists, who re- 
vived the Aristotelian and Leibnizian tradition. They 
were alienated even from Schopenhauer and Schelling, 
because, having felt the influence of science, they could 
not be wholly in sympathy with the romantic and a 
priort method of dealing with nature. Fechner, whose 
Zenda Vesta appeared in 1851, and Lotze, whose Micro- 
cosmos appeared in 1856, were not only spiritualistic in 
their metaphysics, but were among the founders of ex- 
perimental and physiological psychology. The third of 
the great representatives of this movement? was von 
Hartmann, whose Philosophy of the Unconscious (Phi- 
losophie des Unbewussten) was published in 1869. 

The currents of thought which were characteristic of 
German philosophy in 1860 were reproduced in Italy, 
France, England, and America. In these countries as 
well as in Germany, one finds two major and conflicting 
tendencies, on the one hand naturalism, either mate- 
rialistic or positivistic, and on the other hand the anti- 
naturalistic movement, inclining either to idealism or 
to a spiritualistic realism. 


1To this latter group belonged Christian Hermann Werssp (1801- 
1866), Karl Philipp Fischer (1807-1885), and Immanuel Hermann 
Fichte (1797-1879). 

2§14, 


8 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


§2. Italy 


ITaLiAN thought, outside of orthodox Catholicism, 
was dominated at the opening of the century by the 
sensationalism and naturalism of the French Revolu- 
tion. Later influences of the same type were received 
from Comte, and stimulated the work of Arpiao, the 
leader of Italian positivism.1 

Italian spiritualism and idealism were represented 
toward the middle of the century by Rosmini and 
GIOBERTI,? who were churchmen and patriots as well as 
philosophers; and sought, on the one hand, to reconcile 
Catholicism with modern philosophy by emphasizing 
the Platonic-idealistic element in Christian thought, 
and, on the other hand, to give a philosophical and 
spiritual meaning to Italian national aspirations. They 
borrowed something of the letter of Kantianism and 
some of the extravagances of romanticism, but the new 
critical spirit was inconsistent with the theological and 
dogmatic tradition which as yet dominated Italian 
thought. When, after 1848, the nationalistic movement 
became increasingly secular and anti-traditional, Italian 
thought became more receptive to the German, and in 


1 Roberto Ardigd, 1828-1918. His La Psicologia come Scienza positiva 
appeared in 1871. Giuseppe Ferrari (1811-1876) and Ausonio Franchi 
(1821-1895) represent the critical and sceptical reaction against both 
Catholic orthodoxy and the spiritualistic metaphysics. 

2 Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797-1855); Vincenzo Gioberti (1801- 
1852). These are the first Italian philosophers of importance after 
Giovanni Battista Vico (16687-1744). Pasquale Gallupi (1770-1846), 
who slightly preceded them, was influenced by the Scottish school, and 
in particular by Reid. Their successor was Terenzio Mamiani, a Chris- 
tian Platonist like themselves, but more free from the influence of 
dogina and authority. 


PHILOSOPHY IN 1860 9 


particular to the Hegelian, influence. This influence was 
_ spread after 1860 by the teaching of Vera and Spa- 
vENTA at Naples.! At the same time the powerful re- 
vival of the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas was 
inaugurated by the famous Philosophia christiana, pub- 
lished by CAJETANO SANSEVERINO? in 1862. This move- 
ment, promoted by the Church, spread rapidly from 
Italy to Catholic thinkers throughout the world.’ 


§3. France 


The philosophical situation in FRANcE in 1860 dif- 
fered profoundly from that of Germany, owing to the 
fact that naturalism, so remarkably developed in the 
closing decades of the eighteenth century, was here 
the indigenous and established, rather than the inno- 
vating, tendency. The naturalism of the Revolutionary 
period had been carried over into the nineteenth cen- 
tury in two forms. The so-called “idealogues,’’ repre- 
sented by Desturr DE Tracy,* continued to psycholo- 
gize concerning the origin of ideas after the manner of 
Condillac and Cabanis. SarintT-Simon,® on the other 
hand, gave his attention to a naturalistic philosophy of 

1 Augusto Vera (1813-1885) was primarily a translator and expositor 
of Hegel; cf. his ’ Hégélianisme et la Philosophie, 1861. Bertrando Spa- 
venta, (1817-1883) attempted to free Hegelianism from the odium of a 
- foreign importation and to assimilate it to the Italian tradition; cf. his 
La Filosofia di Gioberti, 1863. 

2 1811-1865. 

3 § 27. 7 

41754-1836: Giwores Completes, 1824. 

5Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, 1760-1825: 
Cuvres Choisis, 1859-1861. With Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Pierre 
Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), and the Englishman Robert Owen (1771- 


1858), he belongs to the group of “‘utopian”’ or “‘humanitarian”’ social- 
ists, with which the history of modern socialism begins. 


10 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


history, to the classification of the sciences, and to so- 
cial reform. From these sources sprang the French posi- 
_tivistic system of Auguste Comte.! This great philoso- 
pher had himself passed from the scene in 1857, but his 
influence, as manifested in Lirrrs&, Taine, and RENAN,? 
was paramount at the time of the Second Empire in 
secular and unofficial circles, and has maintained itself 
steadily down to the present date. 

This naturalistic tendency within philosophy proper 
was reinforced, as in other countries, by the influence of 
science. Cuvier, Laplace, and Lamarck? had given 
France a position of ascendancy in science at the open- 
ing of the century. The eminent physicist AmpPmre laid 


1§ 9, 

2 Maximilien Paul Emile Littré (1801-1881) was an expositor of 
Comte, though a dissenter from the strict Comtean orthodoxy. His 
works were: Analyse raisonnée du Cours de Philosophie positive de M. A. 
Comte, 1845; Application de la Philosophie positive au Gouvernement des 
Sociétés, 1849; Conservation, Révolution et Positivisme, 1852; Paroles de 
Philosophie positive, 1859; Auguste Comie et la Philosophie positive, 1863; 
Fragments de Philosophie positive et de Sociologie contemporaine, 1876. 
Littré was also the founder of the Revue positive (1867-1883), and author 
of the Dictionnaire de la Langue francaise. 

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828-1893; Les Philosophes frangais au 
XIX® Siecle, 1857; Del Intelligence, 1870) and Ernest Renan (1823-1892; 
L’ Avenir de Science, written in 1848, but not published until 1890) were 
versatile and widely influential thinkers, who developed away from their 
earlier positivistic position. Taine was a historian and critic of litera- 
ture and art, while Renan (like his contemporary, David Strauss) was 
one of the founders of modern biblical criticism. To these names should 
be added that of Etienne Vacnrrot (1809-1897), who emphasized the 
gulf between the reality revealed in science and the ideal conceived and 
pursued by man. He was closely related to the “left’’ of the Hegelian 
group. 

8 Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, 
1744-1829; Philosophie Zoologique, 1809. ‘The influence of Lamarck did 
not make itself felt in French philosophy until the principles of evolu- 
tion had been given prominence by Darwin and Spencer. Comte and 
his followers, holding to the discontinuity of nature, rejected the La- 
marckian theory of the development of species. 


PHILOSOPHY IN 1860 11 


the foundations of modern electromagnetism in 1820, 
and in the 1860’s Brrnarp, BERTHELOT, and PASTEUR 
were continuing this brilliant tradition. But the de- 
votion of French science to the experimental and math- 
ematical method, together with the pervasive spirit of 
positivism, prevented the appearance in France of the 
dogmatic materialism which characterized this period 
in Germany. 

Turning to spiritualism and idealism, the extreme re- 
action, in the name of religious faith and authority, to 
the excesses of the Revolution, had run its course’; and 
had been superseded by the official and academic phi- 
losophy of Cousin, whose famous lectures on The True, 
the Beautiful, and the Good had created a furore in 1818, 
and who reached the height of his power in the middle 
of the century. His philosophy was an eclectic spiri- 
tualism, derived in part from Scotch realism, in part 
from Schelling and Hegel, and in part from earlier sev- 
enteenth- and eighteenth-century sources.® To Cousin 
was also due the rediscovery of Maine de Biran,* who 

1 André Marie Ampére (1775-1836) is characteristic of the close rela- 
tion between French science and philosophy in the nineteenth century. 
Ampére was an intimate associate of the “‘idealogues”’ and of Maine de 
_Biran, and wrote himself both acutely and voluminously onthe origin 
of ideas and theory of knowledge. 

2 Claude Bernard (1813-1878) and Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) were 
biologists and physiologists. Pierre Eugéne Marcellin Berthelot (1827- 
1907) was one of the founders of modern physical chemistry. 

3 The most important philosophical representatives of this reactionary 
tendency, commonly known as “traditionalism,” were Joseph de MAIstRB 
(1754-1821) and Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonaup (1754-1840). 

4 Through Roger Collard, who introduced Reid in his lectures at the 
Sorbonne, 1811-1814. Cf. § 15. 

5 Other members of this so-called ‘Eclectic School” were Théodore 


Simon Jourrroy (1796-1842) and Paul Janpr (1823-1899). 
6 §15. 


12 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


had exercised little influence during his life (1766-1824), 

‘but now assumed a position of steadily growing impor- 
tance in French thought. 

As the school of Cousin lost prestige it was superseded 
in the 1860’s by two new movements. The first of these 
was identified with the name of Renouvier,! who began 
the publication of his Hssazs de Critique générale in 
1854, and who, like his German contemporary Lotze, 
represented not only the Kantian and spiritualistic mo- 
tives, but the influence of science as well.? The second 
of the new movements was inaugurated by Ravaisson® 
and in particular by his famous Report on Philosophy in 
France (Rapport sur la Philosophie en France au XIX 
Siécle), prepared in 1867. This work was a résumé and 
critique of the past, in which the author rejected both 
positivism and eclecticism; and also an appeal for a 
new spiritualism, which should be both rigorous in its 
methods and boldly metaphysical in its results. 


§4. Great Britain 


Turning to the state of Brrrisu philosophy in 1860, 
we find the naturalistic tendency broadly represented 
by Buckie, whose famous History of Civilization, 
founded on the premise of inflexible natural law, was 
an attempt to interpret history in terms of the physical 


1§ 16. 

2 A similar position is occupied by the mathematician Antoine Augus- 
tin Cournot (1801-1877), who like Renouvier approached philosophy 
through an examination of the limits of science, but stood closer to 
Comte. Cf. his Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances, 1851, 
and T'raité de ’ Enchainement des Idées fondamentales, 1861. 

$§ 15. 

4 Henry Thomas Buckle, 1821-1862. The History of Civilization was 
published in 1857 and 1861. 


PHILOSOPHY IN 1860 13 


environment, and progress in terms of the advancement 
of science. The positivistic movement in Great Britain 
was represented in 1860 most notably by the positivism 
of John Stuart Mill, who, following his father, Jamzs 
Mit1,! continued the empirical tradition of the eigh- 
teenth century, and was at the same time related to 
Comte. Other representatives of this empirical type of 
positivism were the psychologist and moralist Alexan- 
der Batn,? and George Henry Lewss,? who interested 
himself especially in the problem of the relations of 
mind and body, and who, like J. S. Mill, was influenced 
by Comte. Somewhat later CLirrorp,* beginning as a 
zealous and uncompromising advocate of the scientific 
method, sought in panpsychism a method of construing 
physical nature in terms of experience, and thus of over- 
coming the dualism of mind and matter. 

From the side of science the greatest stimulus to nat- 
uralism in England came from the new conception of 
evolution. If the discoveries of physics were not philo- 
sophically fruitful in England at this time it was not 
for lack of eminent men. Davy, Farapay, Kevin, and 
MAXWELL,’ as well as Joule, stood in the foremost ranks 
of science, and contributed largely to that unified view 


11773-1836. He is known as one of the founders of the “‘association- 
ist’ school in psychology (Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 
1829), and as, after Bentham, the leader of the “utilitarian” school in 
ethics. Cf. §10._ - 

21818-1903: The Senses and the Intellect, 1855; The Emotions and the 
Will, 1859. 

31817-1878: Comte’s Philosophy of the Positive Sciences, 1853; Prob- 
lems of Life and Mind, 1874-1879. 

4 William Kingdon Clifford, 1845-1879: Lectures and Essays, 1879. 

5 Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829); Michael Faraday (1791-1867); 
Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) (1824-1907); James Clerk Maxwell 
(1831-1879), 


14 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


of nature as a physico-chemical system which had ex- 
cited the speculative imagination of the German mate- 
rialists. But whether because of the anti-metaphysical 
temper of British thought, or because the concep- 
tion of evolution appealed more strongly to the spirit 
of the age and touched human interests more nearly, 
in any case, the influence of physics was at the time 
almost wholly eclipsed by that of the biological sciences 
as represented by Darwin and Spencer.! The former’s 
epoch-making work on the Origin of Species appeared 
in 1859. Spencer, to be sure, made much of the princi- 
ple of the conservation of force and matter, as well as 
of the results of the new geology,? but his own scientific 
competence lay within the field of the biological and 
social sciences, and his final synthesis, formulated in 
1862 in his First Principles, was a law of evolution. In 
the controversy which the theory of evolution at once 
precipitated, the most redoubtable controversial cham- 
pion was Huxtey,’? who not only played an important 
part in the dissemination of the theory, but sought to 
work out its philosophical presuppositions and moral 
applications. Associated in the same cause was TYn- 
DALL and afterward Romaness,‘ who devoted himself 
to a study of the evolution of mind, and hoped to recon- 
cile Darwinism with religion. 

1 §§ 6, 7. 

2'The so-called “‘uniformitarian” geology, founded on the work of 
the mineralogist James Hutton (1726-1797), and developed at this time 
by Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875). } 

8 Cf. his famous essay on Man’s Place in Nature, 1863; and his volume 
on Hume, 1878. Thomas Henry Huxley was born in 1825 and died in 1895. 

4 John Tyndall, 1820-1893: Fragments of Science, 1871. George John 
Romanes, 1848-1894: A Candid Examination of Theism, 1878; Mental 


Evolution in Man, 1888. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) arrived in- 
dependently at conclusions similar to Darwin’s in 1858. 


PHILOSOPHY IN 1860 15 


The indigenous spiritualistic movement of the Scotch 
realists, provoked by the sceptical conclusions of Hume, 
was brought to a close by Sir William Hamiuron and 
Henry MaAnsE.,! who argued the relativity of all knowl- 
edge and hence the impossibility of knowing the “un- 
conditioned’’; and who, having thus disposed of every 
rationalistic metaphysics (including naturalism), de- 
fended a spiritualistic and religious belief founded on 
analogy and faith. The negative or agnostic portion of 
their thought was absorbed by Spencer; while their 
qualified support of spiritualistic and religious belief 
was rapidly superseded by the rising influence of the 
Kantian and post-Kantian thought, for whose intro- 
duction into England Hamilton was himself partly re- 
sponsible, and against which his polemic had been 
largely directed. This new and transforming influence 
had already permeated literature and popular thought 
through the medium of CoLERIDGE and Cartyte.2 It 
now established itself in academic and scholarly circles 
through Strrume’s® Secret of Hegel, which appeared in 
1865, and marks the beginning of the idealistic move- 
ment which, through Caird, Green, Bradley, and oth- 


1 Hamilton was born in 1788, and died in 1856. His Discussions on 
Philosophy and Literature were published in 1852, and his Lectures on 
Metaphysics (posthumously) in 1859. Henry Longueville Mansel (1820- 
1871) is chiefly famous for his lectures on the Limits of Religious Thought, 
delivered and published in 1858. 

2JIn particular through Coleridge’s Azds to Reflection, published in 
1825, in which the author invokes the Kantian conception of an intuitive 
“reason”? to escape the metaphysical shortcomings of the ‘‘under- 
standing.’”? Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 and died in 1834. 
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was the great English apostle of romanti- 
cism, deriving his inspiration mainly from Fichte and Goethe. His 
Sartor Resartus appeared in 1833, his French Revolution in 1837, and in 
1860 he was at work on his History of Frederick IT. 

8 James Hutchinson Stirling, 1820-1909. 


16 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


ers, came to dominate English philosophy at the close 
of the century.’ 
§5. America 


AMERICA produced no eminent representatives of the 
naturalistic movement during the nineteenth century, 
but was influenced by contemporary English thought, 
as well as, to a lesser degree, by Comte. Mill was widely 
read, as Locke had been in the previous century, and 
his leadership was followed in circles of economic and 
political liberalism. Here, as in England, the scientific 
conception that most affected philosophical thinking 
was that of evolution.” The publication of Darwin’s 
Origin of Species precipitated in America in 1860 a lively 
controversy both among scientists themselves and be- 
tween the party of science and the party of religion. 
AGassiz, an eminent biologist and geologist, and a dis- 
tinguished exponent of the spirit and method of science, 
resisted the Darwinian teachings, and defended both 
the immutability of species and the older hierarchical 
philosophy of nature.’ The principal champion of Dar- 


1§17. 

2 The most eminent representative in America at this time of the new 
physics was Joseph Henry (1797-1878). As Secretary of the Smith- 
sonian Institution, and as first president of the National Academy of 
Sciences, founded in 1863, he accomplished much for the development 
of experimental science and of technology in America, but this move- 
ment appears to have exerted little or no ‘influence in the direction of 
positivism or materialism. Josiah Willard Gress (1839-1903), one of 
the founders of physical chemistry, and perhaps the greatest of Ameri- 
can scientists, was scarcely known outside the circle of his collaborators. 
The general standpoint of naturalism, especially in its opposition to 
religion, was represented by John William Draper (1811-1882) in his 
History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1862) and his Conflict 
between Religion and Science (1874). 

3 Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873) had originally derived his 
zoological principles from Cuvier and his philosophy of nature from the 


PHILOSOPHY IN 1860 17 


win was the botanist Asa Gray.! These first American 
Darwinians did not find evolution to be in conflict with 
the traditional religious view of the world; but the 
teaching of Darwin, combined with that of Spencer, 
whose works were read in America almost as promptly 
and as widely as in England, exerted a powerful and 
erowing influence in the direction of naturalism, and 
soon gave rise to an evolutionary philosophical cult, of 
which the most conspicuous leader was John Fisxx.? 
The academic philosophy of the time, providing a 
rational ground for the Protestant faith, was the Scot- 
tish realism, introduced in earlier days by WiTHER- 
SPOON, and now represented by McCosu and Portrr.? 
This philosophy was not without a tincture of Kantian- 
ism, but the latter current came mainly, as in England, 
from two sources and in two successive waves. EMErR- 
son‘ was at this time in the full vigor of his genius. 
While drawing inspiration from many sources, his 
“transcendentalism’’? was influenced largely by Cole- 
ridge’s Ads to Reflection, and thus indirectly by Schel- 
ling. Like Coleridge and Carlyle in England, Emerson 


teachings of Schelling. His chief disciple in America was Joseph Le 
Conte (1823-1901), whose Evolution, Iis Evidences and Its Relation to 
Religious Thought appeared in 1891. 

11810-1888; afterward supported by the geologist James, Dwight 
Dana (1813-1895). 

21842-1901. Fiske lectured on ‘‘The Positive Philosophy” in 1869; 
and published his Outline of Cosmic Philosophy in 1874. 

8 John Witherspoon (1723-1794) came from Scotland in 1768 to be 
president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). 
James McCosh (1811-1894), a pupil of Hamilton, came from Scotland 
to the same institution just one hundred years later. Noah Porter (1811- 
1892) was president of Yale College from 1871 to 1886. 

‘Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882. The Conduct of Life appeared 
in 1860, the Essays having been published in 1842. 


18 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


and the Transcendentalists represented post-Kantian 
thought in its romantic form and in its literary and 
popular manifestations. Transcendentalism was also 
linked with Scottish realism through the influence of 
Cousin, whose works were translated and widely read 
in the second quarter of the century. The second wave 
of Kantian influence came in America, as in England, 
in the form of the introduction of Hegel. The study 
and translation of this philosopher, inaugurated in 1867 
by Harris,! marked the beginning in America of the 
idealistic movement, which numbered Howison and 
Royce among its more conspicuous leaders, and which 
rapidly rose to a position of ascendancy in the second 
half of the nineteenth century.? 

1 William Torrey Harris (1835-1909) founded in 1867 the Journal of 
Speculative Philosophy and was the leader of the so-called ‘‘St. Louis 
School.”” Owing to the influence upon Harris of a German pioneer 
named H. C. Brockmeyer, this movement may be said to have been in 


part a direct importation from Germany to the American Middle West. 
2§18. 


PART, I 
NATURALISM, MATERIALISM, AND POSITIVISM 


Just after the middle of the nineteenth century, nat- 
uralism, or the philosophy inspired by science, recov- - 
ered an influence upon European thought similar to 
that which it had possessed at the close of the eigh- 
teenth century. But the new naturalism was governed 
by new motives. While the naturalism of the eighteenth 
century had been an effect of the mechanical theory, 
generalized by Newton, and now extended to life, mind, © 
and society, the new naturalism was stimulated by the 
theories of evolution and conservation. The older nat- 
uralism had represented the cosmos as a system of 
moving bodies governed by mathematical law, while 
the newer naturalisms represented the cosmos as a 
majestic process of natural history, or as a fixed quan- 
tity of matter, force, or energy (substance) having mul- 
tiple and variable manifestations. Along with these 
comprehensive materialistic views of the world, calcu- 
lated, whatever the intent of their authors, to serve the 
purpose of a metaphysics, there arose the cult of positiv- 
ism, which was concerned with the scientific way of 
thinking rather than with the scientific account of the | 
world; or with science itself, rather than with nature. 
Considering naturalism first on its constructive side, as 
offering a complete picture of nature in terms of science, 
its most powerful impulse came from the biological 


conception of evolution. 
19 


20 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


§6. Darwin and Darwinism 


CHARLES RoBeRT Darwin, born in 1809, was the 
grandson of Erasmus Darwin,! famous for his poetic 
versions of natural evolution and for his anticipation of 
the Lamarckian theory. The younger Darwin was grad- 
uated from Cambridge University, but owed his bio- 
logical vocation less to his formal education than to 
his private studies and excursions as an amateur geolo- 
gist; these culminating in his being chosen, in 1831, as 
naturalist to the expedition on board the Beagle. This 
expedition spent five years surveying the South Ameri- 
can coasts and neighboring islands, and afforded Darwin 
abundant opportunity both to collect diverse forms of 
animal life and to observe their geographical distribu- 
tion. Soon after his return he began his prolonged stud- 
ies of the transmutation of species, leading to the pub- 
lication in 1859 of his epoch-making work, On the Origin 
of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preser- 
vation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. This 
was followed by The Variation of Animals and Plants 
Under Domestication, in 1868; the Descent of Man and 
Selection in Relation to Sex, in 1871; and the Expression 
of the Emotions, in 1872. In spite of his frail health Dar- 
win persevered in laborious and detailed studies of 
plant life up to within a few months of his death in 
1882. His open-mindedness, scrupulousness, and union 
of inventive capacity with painstaking observation, to- 
gether with the purity of his personal character, have 


11731-1802. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 21 


justly led to his canonization among the patron saints 
of modern science. 

Darwin made two major contributions to biology. 
In the first place, through his comprehensive survey of 
available data and his masterly inductions, he brought 
about the definitive scientific acceptance of the natural 
origin of new species of plants and animals. As a more 
or less speculative hypothesis, this view dated from the 
time of Empedocles in the fifth century before Christ. 
It had received the qualified indorsement of many emi- 
nent authorities, including Aristotle, Lucretius, St. Au-- 
gustine, Bacon, Leibniz, Diderot, and Kant. In the 
century preceding Darwin’s work this view had gath- 
ered force both from the speculations of philosophers 
of the romantic school, such as Herder, and from the 
observations of biologists such as Buffon.1 The most 
notable of Darwin’s scientific predecessors was La- 
marck, who had not only adopted the general evolu- 
tionary point of view but also elaborated for its expla- 
nation a theory which has lately become the chief rival 
of Darwin’s law of natural selection.?, Even those biolo- 
gists who believed in the immutability of species ac- 
cepted a system of classification which called attention 
to the gradation of their differences, and there was much 
evidence to suggest that the lines between one species 


1 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803); Georges Louis Leclerc, Count 
de Buffon (1707-1788). 

2 According to Lamarck’s theory, organic changes develop through 
the activities which arise in response to the needs of life. Parts which 
are so exercised grow in the direction required for their functional use, 
and these acquisitions being inherited, become the starting-point for 
further developments in successive generations. Thus the race is con- 
tinuously perfected by practice. 


22 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


and another were arbitrarily drawn. The discovery of 
fossil remains indicated that some at least of the exist- 
ing gaps which divide species are due to the extinction 
of earlier forms of life. Comparative anatomy and mor- 
phology brought to light unsuspected family resem- 
blances among distinct species. Both paleontology and 
geography revealed a correspondence between forms of 
life and their physical environment. The new uniformi- 
tarian geology enormously extended the range of time 
in which new species might be supposed to be gradually 
developed upon the earth’s surface. Above all, there 
was a steadily growing disposition on the part of biol- 
ogy to avoid appeal to supernatural or metaphysical 
causes, and to construe life as a part of that nature 
which is for scientific purposes a closed and self-suffi- 
cient system. All of these tendencies of thought con- 
verged in Darwin, and enabled him to secure the ac- 
ceptance of a general view for which the times were 
ripe. 

In the second place, Darwin formulated and verified 
a specific hypothesis for the explanation of the origin of 
species. To this hypothesis he gave the name of ‘“nat- 
ural selection.” ! The starting-point of the theory is 
the fact of variation among the individuals of the same 
species, or among the members of a generation sprung 
from the same ancestry. This is a familiar fact, of which 
the breeder takes advantage in the creation of a new 
stock. The causes of such “individual differences” are 
both numerous and obscure, and their discussion con- 


1 The following is a free rendering of the argument in The Origin of 
Species. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 23 


stitutes an important topic in itself; but these causes 
are not germane to the argument. For the breeder the 
important thing is that the differences occur, and that 
they afford him a wide range of choice. But animals 
and plants in a state of nature exhibit, albeit in a lesser 
degree, a like variability; and just as in the case of arti- 
ficial selection some from among the many varieties 
will serve the breeder’s purpose better than others, so 
in the state of nature some will better serve the needs 
of the organism itself. Just as the man who wishes to 
breed a stock of fleet greyhounds will find among his 
dogs some that are better built for speed than others, 
so among wolves who are forced by circumstances to 
prey upon deer there will be some who are relatively 
slimmer and swifter;! and as the former individuals are 
suited to the breeder’s purpose, so the latter are suited 
to the circumstances of life, or adapted to the environ- 
ment. We have now to ask whether there is any natural 
selective principle, analogous to the human breeder— 
one which guarantees that the better adapted animals 
shall survive and perpetuate their kind. : 

To understand this principle and its modus operand1, 
we have to recognize the prodigality of the reproductive 
process, which brings into existence many more indi- 
viduals than the environment can sustain.? The effect 
of nature’s excessive fecundity is to induce a competi- 
tion for the limited available resources, or a “struggle 


1Qp. cit., 1897, pp. 65-66. 

2 At this point both Darwin and his collaborator Wallace (§ 4) were 
indebted to the study by Malthus of the effects of overpopulation. 
Cf. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), Essay on the Principle of 
Population (1798). 


24 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


for existence.”’ ! The majority must be eliminated: who, 
then, shall survive? The answer seems clear. Those 
who survive will be those, like the slimmer and swifter 
wolves, whose variations best adapt them to existing 
circumstances. Under severely competitive conditions 
even slight variations will be matters of life and death. 
There will be, to use Spencer’s phrase, a “survival of 
the fit.”” In other words, elimination and survival will 
be selective, and will explain both the improvement of 
the stock and the peculiar correspondence between the 
organism and its habitat. 

There is one final step to be taken, and the argument 
is complete. The ‘fit’? who survive and grow to ma- 
turity will reproduce themselves, while the unfit will 
leave no issue. The second generation will inherit those 
favorable variations which enabled their parents to sur- 
vive,? and will develop upon this level a new range of 
variations, among which the more favorable will again 
be selected by the same process; so that the effect will 
be cumulative, and will eventually lead to the forma- 
tion of a new and relatively perfected’ type. Thus the 
play of natural forces, by the addition of slight differ- 
ences and without design, leads to the formation of or- 
ganized structures that are progressively qualified to 
cope with the circumstances of life. By a sort of coup 


1 Wallace’s phrase. 

2 Instead of inheriting the “‘acquired characteristics”’ of the parents, 
as in the Lamarckian and Spencerian theories, Darwinism, taken to- 
gether with Weismann’s theory of the ‘“‘germ-plasm,” rejects the inher- 
itance of skill, strength, or habits that result from experience and 
exercise. Cf. below, § 7. The question is still disputed, with the prepon- 
derance of opinion on the side of Darwin and Weismann. 

* Such adaptive perfection is always relative to the existing environ- 
ment. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 25 


d’état those very aspects of life that had served the 
theory of intelligent design are now made to wear the 
livery of mechanism. 

The theory of natural selection was proposed as the 
most important factor in evolution, rather than as a 
complete explanation. Its incompleteness was recog- 
nized by Darwin himself, and most of the objections 
since raised against it on this score were anticipated. 
In the first place, the theory assumed without explana- 
tion the fundamental vital processes, such as variation, 
growth, reproduction, heredity, and the self-preserva- 
tive impulse which motivates the “struggle for exis- 
tence.’’ In the second place, the theory did not appear 
adequately to account for the survival of useless varia- 
tions, or for such variations as are useful only when 
they have accumulated to the point sufficient to estab- 
lish a new organ. It did not satisfactorily explain why 
the same variations arise simultaneously in individuals, 
as they must if they are not to be lost by cross-breeding. 
The biological criticism of Darwin has, therefore, taken 
the form of advancing other principles of selection, 
which supplement the Darwinian principle or reduce it 
to a place of secondary importance. 

Since Darwin was essentially a biologist, restrained 
from metaphysical speculation by the cautious temper 
of the scientist, how did it happen that his work should 
have created an epoch in philosophy as well as in sci- 
ence, and that he should have said, apropos of his con- 

1 Darwin himself introduced the principle of ‘‘sexual selection,” or 


preferential mating, to account for useless variations; and the principle 
of “isolation’’ to explain the absence of interbreeding. Cf. op. cit., ch. 
IV. 


26 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


viction that species are not immutable, that it was 
“like confessing murder”’ ? ? 

In the first place, the new theory violated prevailing 
habits of mind, rooted in the Aristotelian tradition and 
confirmed among biologists by the influence of Linnzeus 
and Cuvier. In accordance with these habits it was 
customary to classify the forms of life on the assumption 
that they had no history other than their reproduction 
in successive generations of individuals. 

In the second place, the new view violated the teach- 
ings of biblical orthodoxy, or that account of natural 
origins which among devout Protestants was authori- 
tatively recorded,—in prose in the Book of Genesis, 
and in poetry in Milton’s Paradise Lost. 

Deeper than either of these was the conflict between 
the new teaching and the teleological doctrines of the 
great philosophers. Both pagan and Christian philoso- 
phy had taught that nature could not be adequately 
explained without resort to a principle variously known 
as “purpose,” “final cause,” ‘‘ Providence,” and ‘de- 
sign.”” The mechanical theory had made great inroads 
upon this doctrine and the living organism was looked 
upon as its last stronghold. If this marvel of nice ad- 
justment and functional utility could be explained by 
the fortuitous operation of blind forces, then nature no 
longer afforded evidence of intelligence or of spirit or 
of God. Darwinism also created the impression of re- 
ducing nature to an all-pervading and ceaseless flux 


1F, Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), vol. I, p. 384. 
Carolus Linnzus (1707-1778) and Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), 
founders respectively of systematic botany and comparative anatomy. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 27 


without refuge or anchorage. Life had always worn an 
aspect of generation and decay, but had been redeemed 
by the Platonic-Aristotelian idea that the forms which 
it embodied were permanent, and by the Christian idea 
that it was a manifestation of eternal benevolence. Now 
all of these moorings seemed to be dissolved into a flood 
sweeping blindly on without origin, destination, or fixed 
landmarks. 

Finally, there was an obvious application to man 
which Darwin himself did not hesitate to make.! As 
one species among others, man, too, had his natural 
origin, and was conceived to spring from simian stock. 
There is a disposition to judge man’s destiny by his 
source and to suppose that a lowly origin must contra- 
dict his high calling.” 

Turning from these negative philosophical implica- 
tions, we find in Darwin the germs of a more positive 
teaching concerning man and his place in the world. 
Darwin’s studies of instinct and of emotional expres- 
sion’ were important and lasting contributions to the 
new science of psychology. His central conceptions are 
readily transposed to cognition, and have in recent 
times led to a theory of knowledge, in which concepts, 
like species, are regarded as plastic and variable, hav- 
ing a natural genesis and a capacity to survive accord- 
ing to the degree to which they fit the concrete situa- 
tion to which they are applied.‘ 


1In his Descent of Man. 

2 That Darwin himself did not accept such an inference, but regarded 
man’s natural descent as an ennobling rather than degrading concep- 
tion, appears in the closing paragraphs of his Descent of Man. 

2 Origin of Species, ch. VIII; Expression of the Emotions. 

4Cf. E. Mach (§ 11) and J. Dewey (§ 25). 


28 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


There were certain moral and religious implications 
which Darwin drew himself, or which his teachings sug- 
gested to others. What is, in the broad sense, known 
as ‘evolutionary ethics” assumed three quite distinct 
forms. Darwin proposed to reconcile evolution with 
traditional ethics through the conception of adaptation. 
Some degree of sociality, or of mutual aid and sym- 
pathy, is a condition of the survival of a race, and is 
therefore as ‘‘natural”’ as the self-seeking propensities. 
Conscience may be construed in this sense as a set of 
favorable variations. This is the form of evolutionary 
ethics which was further developed by Spencer. The 
second and third forms take the conception of struggle 
rather than that of adaptation, as their point of depar- 
ture. According to the second view, developed by Hux- 
ley,! the natural life presents the antithesis of the moral 
life. In the natural life the individual exploits his su- 
periority, and the weak are allowed to suffer the fatal 
consequences of their weakness; whereas in the moral 
life the weak are protected by the self-sacrifice or assis- 
tance of others. The third view would propose to ac- 
cept capacity to survive as its criterion of good, and 
would reject the traditional ethics as interfering with 
the operation of the law of natural selection. Let the 
strong man assert his strength, and in this way guaran- 
tee the future of the race. It is this idea that links the 
teachings of Darwin with the ethics of Nietzsche.” The 


1In his Evolution and Ethics. 

*§21. From the idea that the moral practice of civilized societies in- 
terferes with the law of natural selection and permits the weak to survive 
and reproduce themselves, has sprung the modern cult of eugenics. Cf. 
Karl Pearson, Groundwork of Eugenics, 1909. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 29 


extension of the same idea to social groups has been 
used by the Marxian socialists as a justification of class- 
struggle, and by extreme nationalists as a justification 
of war and aggrandizement. 

As regards the religious implications of his teachings, 
Darwin was led more and more to the rejection of the 
traditional conception of a providential God. Not only 
did the law of natural selection, in his judgment, de- 
stroy the force of the argument from design, but it re- 

vealed nature in a light that was scarcely compatible 
- with the supposition of benevolent authorship. Never- 
theless his natural piety, together with his unwillingness 
to pronounce judgment on questions which he felt to 
lie beyond his competence and to involve the happiness 
of other people, deterred him from an aggressive dis- 
belief. He wavered between a theistic belief in “laws 
impressed on matter by the Creator,” 1 and a tolerant 
and reticent “agnosticism.” ? 


§7. Cosmic Evolution. Snencer 


Darwin was the author of a scientific hypothesis 
which lent itself to philosophical interpretation and ex- 
tension. HERBERT SPENCER, on the other hand, was a 
philosopher with a prepossession for science. With 
Darwin evolution was a biological law; with Spencer it 
was a cosmic generalization. He was born in Derby, 
England, in 1820. Declining the opportunity of a uni- 
versity education, he found employment from 1837, 
first as an engineer and afterward, until 1853, as sub- 
editor of The Economist. By this time his central ideas 


1 Origin of Species, p. 402. 2 Infe and Letters, vol. I, ch. VIII. 


30 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


were fixed and he was ready to devote the remainder of 
his life to their systematic elaboration. His scientifie 
tastes and aptitudes inclined him from the beginning 
to the naturalistic philosophy. As early as 1839 he had 
derived the idea of development from a study of Lyell’s 
Geology. In his Social Statics, published in 1850, he pro- 
posed to extend the idea of development to society. 
The first edition of his Psychology, published in 1855, 
revealed both his introduction of the same genetic 
method into the study of mind, and also his assimila- 
tion of the sensationalism and associationism of the 
British empirical tradition. In divers essays he had 
also made clear the strongly individualistic bias of his 
moral and economic thought. In 1857 a treatise on 
Progress : Its Laws and Cause set forth the general prin- 
ciple under which he proposed to subsume the totality 
of knowledge; and in 1860 he announced the plan of 
his Synthetic Philosophy, to be executed in ten volumes. 
To the fulfilment of this programme he devoted him- 
self unrelentingly, despite the uncertainty of his health, 
for thirty-six years.1 He died in 1902, a monument of 
methodical industry and heroic perseverance. 

Spencer represents all of the different motives of the 
naturalistic school. Like Comte,? he found nature to 
culminate in society, and was one of the founders of 


1 The parts of his system and the dates of their completion are as fol- 
lows: First Principles, 1862; Principles of Biology (two volumes), 1864- 
1867; Principles of Psychology (second edition, two volumes), 1870-1872; 
Principles of Sociology (three volumes), 1876-1896; Principles of Ethics 
(two volumes), 1879-1892. Among the more important of his smaller 
works are Education (1861) and The Man versus The State (1884). In 
addition he wrote many articles and pamphlets and an Autoblography, 
published in 1904. 

7§§3, 9. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 31 


the science of sociology; and like Biichner and Haeckel,! 
he was profoundly influenced by the theory of the con- 
servation of energy. But the most notable features of 
his thought are his limitation of knowledge to the field 
of experience and to the content of science; and his 
elaboration of a cosmic philosophy in terms of a gen- 
eralization of the idea of evolution. Spencer’s system 
thus falls into two main divisions, which are very un- 
equally represented in his written works: his agnostic 
realism, defended in parts of the Furst Principles and 
Psychology, and his evolutionary survey of nature and 
man. The former constitutes the definition of his fun- 
damental philosophical position and its reconciliation 
to the claims both of faith and of reason; the latter, his 
résumé and unification of the content of science. 
With Hamilton and Mansel, Spencer subscribed to 
the doctrine of the “relativity of knowledge,” and the 
consequent impossibility of knowing that non-relative 
or Absolute which has been the dream of metaphysi- 
cians.? To know a thing is to relate it to other things 
and to ourselves, or to introduce qualifying conditions; ~ 
what the thing is unconditionally, must, therefore, es- 
cape us. But it does not follow, as Hamilton had sup- 
posed, that the unconditioned plays a wholly negative 
part in our thought. In the very recognition of our 
limits we refer beyond them to that Force which thrusts 
phenomena upon us. In calling it the Unknowable, 
therefore, Spencer did not imply doubt as to its exis- 
tence. In fact, the Unknowable is in a sense the most 
familiar of objects. Science, in reaching out toward a 


1 §$1, 8. 2 First Principles, part I. 


32 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


first cause, or a final goal, or a supreme generalization, 
is perpetually forced to acknowledge it; the religious of 
all the ages have stood awe-struck in its presence. It 
thus furnishes the bond and the means of reconciliation 
between science and religion. Since the Unknowable 
cannot be known, science will of necessity relegate it 
to religion; but since science affirms the Unknowable, 
religion may be said to enjoy scientific support. 

Over and above the dialectical proof of the Unknow- 
able, there is a more empirical proof, derived from the 
examination of the data of experience. After the man- 
ner of Locke and Hume, Spencer distinguished between 
the relatively “vivid,” constant, and uncontrollable im- 
pressions of sense, and the relatively “faint” and con- 
trollable series of ideas;! and in a manner that is remi- 
niscent of Reid and Hamilton, he regarded the former 
as accompanied by a necessary belief in their external- 
ity of origin. This necessity of belief, or inconceivabil- 
ity of the opposite, thinks Spencer, is that which must 
always govern thought in the end. To affirm that of 
which the opposite is inconceivable is the “Universal 
Postulate” of cognition, or the ultimate test of valid- 
ity.2 Certainty diminishes, however, in proportion to 
the number of times that this test is employed. Judged 
by this criterion of relative certainty, the affirmation of 
external reality which accompanies sensations is more 
certain than an affirmation regarding these sensations 
themselves, since the latter presupposes the former. 
Idealism, which employs this derived or secondary cog- 


1 First Principles, part II, ch. 11; Principles of Psychology, part VII, 
ch. XVI. 
2 Principles of Psychology, part VII, ch. XI. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 33 


nition, is therefore less certain than realism, which / 
trusts the primary cognition of sensation. In other 
words, we are more certain (through perception) that 
there is an external reality than (through reflection) 
that we have perceptions of it. 

Our “vivid” experiences give us knowledge of an 
external world through a sense of resistance, which is 
most unmistakable in the case of muscular sensation. 
We are thus led to represent the external reality to our- 
selves as a sort of power, acting on us in a manner anal- 
ogous to that in which we act on ourselves, as when, 
for example, we press one hand upon another. But this 
representation is purely symbolic. Strictly speaking, 
all that we know of external reality through sensation 
is that there is a something which is thus manifesting 
itself to us—a something whose existence is undeniable 
but whose nature is unknowable. 

The view of the Unknowable reached by this empiri- 
cal approach Spencer calls ‘“transfigured realism,” as 
distinguished both from naive realism and from ideal- 
ism or scepticism.! _ It differs from naive realism in that 
it denies that our sensations reveal, either in their con- 
tent cr in their order, the nature of objective fact. It 
differs from idealism, on the other hand, in affirming 
that the order of our sensations varies with objective 
fact, and is at all points determined by it, as the pro- 
jection of a cube on the surface of a cylinder, although 
not cubical, is nevertheless so related to the cube that 
any changes in the latter will induce corresponding 
changes in the former. 


1 Principles of Psychology, §§ 472-474. 


34 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


What is or is not inconceivable to us depends on cer- 
tain established connections among our ideas, and there- 
fore reflects the constitution of our minds. So much in 
general terms Spencer conceded to Kant. But as an 
assoclationist Spencer contended that this order among 
our ideas is an effect of the persistence or frequency of 
the vivid connections. The more often we experience 
things together, the more impossible it is for us to think 
them apart. To every new experience we thus bring 
certain habits of thought that reflect the experiences of 
the past, and that constitute our preformed and in- 
grained intelligence. ‘This reflects not only the past ex- 
perience of the individual, but ancestral experience as 
well, and may therefore be regarded, relatively to the 
individual, as a priorz.1 But it is justified because in its 
ultimate origin, or relatively to the racial experience, it is 
a posteriori, being a correspondence of internal to external 
relations. This was Spencer’s proposed reconciliation 
of Kantian transcendentalism with British empiricism. 

While Spencer’s philosophy will be judged by critical 
historians in terms of its theory of knowledge, the pow- 
erful influence which it exerted in the latter half of the 
nineteenth century was due rather to its grandiose 
architecture than to the solidity of its foundations. In 
English-speaking countries it stood for several decades 
as the most imposing monument of science, in which 
the extensive but scattered results of research were so 
conjoined as to afford a unified picture of the total cos- 
mos. The materials were drawn from all the special 
sciences, inorganic as well as organic, but they received 


1 Principles of Psychology, § 208. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 35 


their structural and pictorial unity from the principle 
of development or evolution. The conservation of en- 
ergy, or, as Spencer preferred to call it, “the persistence 
of force,’’! was accepted as the universal law governing 
physical changes, and defended on a priori as well as — 
on experimental grounds. But this law applies to life 
and mind only when these are first reduced to physico- 
chemical terms. The only “synthetic” law which is 
directly applicable to phenomena of every level—which 
unites them all concretely, and which reveals their his- 
torical trend—is the law of increasing organization, or 
of correlative differentiation and unification. ‘ Evolu- 
tion is an integration of matter and concomitant dissi- 
pation of motion; during which the matter passes from 
an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite co- 
herent heterogeneity; and during which the retained 
motion undergoes a parallel transformation.” ? This 
principle Spencer both illustrated from existing science 
and extended into new fields. He found it in the evolu- 
tion of the sidereal universe out of the primitive nebula; 
in the history and development of the earth; in the 
origin of life and of new and more complex species of 
organism; in the formation of complex ideas out of the 
primitive manifold of sensory “shocks”’; in the build- 
ing of an integrated will out of elementary reflexes; and 
in the progressive complication and organization of so- 
ciety. The application of this principle thus served the 
double purpose of exhibiting the fruitfulness of the ge- 
netic method, and of presenting nature as a totality 


1 First Principles, part II, ch. VII. 
2 Tbid., part II, ch. XVII. 


386 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


with a majestic sweep of outline, and a clearly recog- 
nizable meaning and direction. 

Finally, Spencer exerted a strong influence upon the 
moral and social philosophy of his times, and was a 
powerful exponent of the prevailing tendencies to indi- 
vidualism and liberalism in economic and _ political 
thought. Good consists fundamentally in pleasurable 
activity.! Life and happiness are its inseparable aspects, 
since life would not be deemed good if it were not pleas- 
ant, and pleasure is essentially a sign of successful or 
well-adapted life. The course of evolution is a change 
for the better; the evolved society and the good life are 
one and the same thing. For as life evolves it is both 
differentiated and integrated—both increased in amount 
and harmoniously adjusted, within and without. The 
evolved society represents both the maximum amount 
of life and its maximum smoothness and facility, thus 
doubly implying a maximum of happiness. ‘Absolute 
ethics” defines the conduct proper to such a perfected 
society, and “relative ethics” the conduct proper to 
the imperfect stages through which it is approached. 

In the evolved society men will have many interests, 
but these interests will be tempered by the exigencies 
of social relations; so that men will be prompted by 
interest, and especially by sympathy and benevolence, 
to do that which is at the same time conducive to the 
interests of others. ‘The advance toward this happy 
state takes place through the gradual alteration of hu- 
man nature as a consequence of experience. Conscience 
is the past precipitate of such moral experience, and is 


1 Principles of Ethics, part I, ch. III. 


NATURALISM AND, POSITIVISM 37 


as yet reminiscent, in its harsh, constraining aspect, of 
a time when all forms of wrong-doing were penalized by 
force. Moral regeneration cannot be achieved at one 
stroke by instruction or governmental control, but is 
the slow, cumulative effect of racial history. Spencer 
was thus led to attach great importance to ‘‘the inheri- 
tance of acquired characters,’’ and defended this view 
in a prolonged controversy with Weismann.’ For the 
same reason he emphasized (in his treatise on Hduca- 
tion) the importance of allowing the individual to learn 
for himself the natural consequences of his own be- 
havior. He also favored a political and economic policy 
of laissez-faire, in which there should be the minimum 
of artificial interference with that interaction of indi- 
viduals in which each learns to adapt himself to others. 
Finally, Spencer found an even more fundamental rea- 
son for his individualism and libertarianism in his be- 
lief that the individual, through being the seat of con- 
scious happiness, is the end for which society exists.” 
The most important transition in social evolution is 
that from the militant to the industrial society. The 
former is doubly repressive, in that it interferes with 
the internal expansion of society, and in that it sub- 
jects individuals to the community. Only in the indus- 
trial society, in which individuals are free to develop 
and adjust their interests, can moral evolution be per- 
fected. The present hope of the world, therefore, lies 
in the establishment of universal peace.’ 
eras Weismann, 1834-1914: Studien zur Descendenztheorte, 1875- 


2 Principles of Sociology, § 322. 
8 Principles of Ethics, part II, §§ 26, 72, 119. 


38 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


§8. Monism of Substance. Haeckel 


Ernst HAECKEL, who was born in 1834, and died in 
1919, and who was professor of zodlogy at the Univer- 
sity of Jena from 1862, represents, like Spencer, the 
philosophical generalization of the content of science. 
He was the most influential exponent of naturalism in 
Germany during the last decades of the nineteenth 
century, his popularity culminating in the extraordi- 
nary vogue of his Riddle of the Universe (Die Weltratsel), 
first published in 1899.1 

Like Spencer, Haeckel made philosophical use of the 
two great scientific theories of his age, the evolution of 
life and the conservation of energy. But while in Spen- 
cer the emphasis is placed on the former, in Haeckel it 
is placed on the latter; the cosmos being conceived, 
after the manner of Moleschott, Biichner, and other 
materialists of the German school,” as a constant quan- 
tity of dynamic substance underlying the variety of 
phenomenal manifestations. Unlike Spencer, Haeckel 
was a biologist of note,’ and in promulgating his views 
he spoke as one having scientific authority. Being less 
philosophically disciplined than Spencer, he dealt more 
lightly with the traditional philosophical difficulties, and 
in particular with the problem of knowledge. He pro- 
fessed to be primarily interested in dispelling the super- 


1 His most important writings, in addition to the above, were his 
Generelle Morphologie (1866), Natiirliche Schépfungsgeschichte (1868), 
and Anthropogenie (1874). The Schépfungsgeschichte has been translated 
into English under the title of The History of Creation (1883), and the 
Anthropogenie under the titles of The Evolution of Man (1879) and The 
Pedigree of Man (1880). 

2§1. 3 An orthodox Darwinian. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM » 39 


stitions of the traditional religion and metaphysics, and 
in proclaiming a sort of new enlightenment, in which 
morality, government, education, and religion should 
profit by the recent extraordinary advance in physical 
science and technology. But his enthusiasm and dog- 
matic temper carried him far beyond the limits of this 
purpose, and led him to formulate a new metaphysics, 
which, whatever its truth, is certainly not less meta- 
physical than the old. 

According to Haeckel, we know external nature 
through sense-impressions, and through ‘“presenta- 
tions” of which ‘“‘we are convinced that their content 
corresponds to the knowable aspect of things.’”’ ‘We 
do not know ‘the thing in itself’ that lies behind these 
knowable phenomena,” nor do we even “clearly know 
whether it exists or not.” He left “the fruitless brood- 
ing over this ideal phantom to the ‘pure metaphysi- 
cian,’ ”’ and turned eagerly to his “‘monistic philosophy 
of nature.” ! He was not troubled, as was Spencer, by 
the fact that the very conceptions of “phenomena” and 
“correspondence” have ulterior implications, or by the 
fact that his philosophy of nature itself transcends both 
phenomena, and the experimental results of science. 

Nor was Haeckel seriously disturbed by the out- 
standing problems of science itself. In addresses deliv- 
ered in 1872 in Leipzig and in 1880 before the Berlin 
Academy of Science, the physiologist Emil Dusors 
REyYmonv? had pronounced his famous ‘“‘Ignorabimus !”’ 


1 Riddle of the Universe, pp. 292, 380-381. References are to the Eng- 
lish translation by J. M. McCabe, 1902. 

2 1818-1896: Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens (1872); Die sieben 
Weltrdisel (1882). 


40 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


We do not as yet, thought this cautious scientist, know 
the origin of life, the explanation of the orderly arrange- 
ment of nature, the origin of reason and of speech, or | 
the truth about the freedom of the will; while on cer- 
tain points, namely, the nature of matter and force, the 
origin of motion, and the origin of consciousness, we 
shall always remain in ignorance. But Haeckel had 
solutions of all these “seven riddles” in terms of two 
fundamental" laws. 

Of these two great solvents the first was ‘‘the law of 
substance” —‘‘the fundamental law of the constancy 
of matter and force.” Although experimentally demon- 
strated by science, this law is, “in the ultimate analy- 
sis,’ ‘‘a necessary consequence of the principle of cau- 
sality.”’? The constancy of matter and of force are 
basally the same thing, because matter and force are 
two aspects of the same substance, the one its space- 
filling or extensional aspect, the other its energetic 
aspect. Under the material aspect may be brought all 
corporeal forms, ponderable mass and imponderable 
ether, the first being only a condensation of the second, 
and the two occupying “infinite space” continuously ; 
under the energetic aspect may be brought not only 
every variety of inorganic force, but the vital, psychic, 
and conscious “affinities” as well. 

The second great solvent is “the universal law of 
evolution,” by which life emerges from physico-chemi- 
cal conditions, “psychoplasm” from protoplasm, and 
“neuroplasm”’ from psychoplasm. Life is the energetic 


1 Riddle of the Universe, pp. 15-16. 
2 Ibid., pp. 381, 215. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 41 


aspect of protoplasm, unconscious mind of psychoplasm, 
and consciousness of the associative centres of the brain. 
Both cognition and will rise in brute and man through 
a series of “psychic gradations,” from irritability and 
reflex action to conscious thought and purpose. All is 
one and continuous, and one can read either from above 
down, and endow the atom with a soul, or from below 
up, and declare that the mind is nothing but force. 

The ‘‘monism of the cosmos,” which is established 
on these two basic principles, of substance and of evo- 
lution, “proclaims the absolute dominion of ‘the great 
eternal iron laws’ throughout the universe. It thus 
shatters, at the same time, the three central dog- 
mas of the dualistic philosophy—the personality of 
God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of 
the will.” ! The emancipated mind will worship Na- 
ture itself, or “the Goddess of truth” that “dwells in 
the temple of nature.” ? With this new “natural reli- 
gion,” which Haeckel proclaimed in opposition to the 
other-worldliness and asceticism of Christianity, was 
allied a new esthetic cult inspired by the wealth of nat- 
ural forms which modern science has disclosed to the 
human eye; a new education, based on the teaching of 
science; and the new ‘‘monistic ethics,” credited t» 
Herbert Spencer, in which egoism and altruism are reec- 
onciled through the development of the social instincts 
in successive generations of the race. 


In two respects the materialistic naturalism which 
has just been expounded shows a tendency to pass over 


1 Riddle of the Universe, p. 381. 2 Ibid., p. 337. 


42 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


into its philosophical opposite—in its emphasis on 
force, and in its emphasis on life. 

Spencer believed the experience of force to afford the 
most adequate possible representation of the unknow- 
able reality. Haeckel, like Biichner before him, while 
preserving the conception of matter, regarded force as 
its inseparable attribute. A step further in this direc- 
tion was later taken by OsTwaLp,! a prominent expo- 
nent of ‘‘energetics” both in physics and chemistry 
and in the philosophy of nature. This philosopher de- 
fines ponderable or tangible matter as a collocation of 
energies, its form being construed in terms of elasticity, 
its volume in terms of compressibility, and its mass in 
terms of work and velocity. Heat, electricity, sound, 
and light are readily subsumed under the same concept. 
Life itself is a peculiar combination of physico-chemical 
energies. Nature having been reduced to energy, the 
antithesis of body and mind disappears, for what is 
mind but energy? Instead of regarding psychical en- 
ergy as parallel to physical energy, Ostwald proposes 
the bold hypothesis that it is convertible from and 
into physico-chemical energies through the intermedi- 
ate form of nervous energy, in accordance with the law 
of conservation.? Thus energy becomes the universal 
substance and its constancy the universal law. But if 
physical energy and felt energy are thus interchange- 
able, it is as true to say that body has been reduced to 


1 Wilhelm Ostwald (1853- ). The systematic presentation of his 
views is to be found in his Vorlesungen wiber Naturphilosophie (1902). 
Ostwald also approaches closely to the position of Mach (§ 11), both in 
his conception of an experience prior to the distinction of subject and 
object, and in his use of the norm of “‘economy”’ in scientific method. 

2 Vorlesungen, pp. 337 ff. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 43 


mind, as to say that mind has been reduced to body. 
From a naturalism of this type it is not difficult to find a 
way across to the spiritualism of Hartmann and Fechner.! 

A bridge from materialistic naturalism to spiritualism 
and idealism is afforded also by its biological emphasis. 
Darwin, as we have seen, presupposed the fundamental 
vital processes, such as growth, reproduction, heredity, 
and organicity; and his influence tended to give vogue 
to these conceptions, and to biological ways of thinking. 
Furthermore, his own theory of natural selection seemed, 
through the conception of “struggle for existence,” to 
justify the assumption of a sort of life-force, which in 
turn readily lent itself to a vitalistic and spiritualistic 
interpretation. 


§9. The Rise of Positivism. Comte 


Positivism is the critical rather than the metaphysi- 
cal or materialistic form of naturalism. It adopts the 
scientific method and theory of knowledge, rather than 
its content and specific doctrines. Underlying this dif- 
ference among types of naturalistic philosophy, there is 
a, difference of attitude on the part of the scientist 
toward his own concepts—the difference, namely, be- 
tween the scientific realist and the scientific nominal- 
ist. This difference is compatible with entire agree- 
ment in scientific doctrine. Of two scientists both may 
accept the same theory, such, for example, as the 
atomic theory; but one may believe nature really to 
consist of atoms hidden from human observation, while 
the other believes them to be convenient terms of dis- 


1 $14. 


44 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


course by which to describe the observable facts. A 
scientist of the first type is accustomed to think of the 
realities as lying beyond experience; and when he phi- 
losophizes he will, like Spencer and Haeckel, fall easily 
into the ways of metaphysics. The scientist of the sec- 
ond type carries with him into philosophy his char- 
acteristic partiality for the observable fact. He may 
allude to an unknown reality, but if so it will be to dis- 
avow his knowledge of it rather than to affirm its real- 
ity. From this cast of mind springs positivism, which 
affirms that for philosophy as for science the only real- 
ity that can be in question is the content of experience. 
To know is not to affirm an ulterior and hidden sub- 
stance or power, but to frame laws which fit experience. 
Although the difference is one of degree rather than of 
kind, we may further distinguish the empirical positiv- 
ists like Comte and Mill, who proclaim the standpoint 
of experience, and regard the descriptive law as a re- 
production of the constant connections among observed 
facts; and the economical positivists like Lange, Mach, 
and Poincaré, who emphasize the factor of technic which 
is introduced into the situation by the scientist himself, 
and who hold that the laws of nature are in some de- 
gree constructed in accordance with the constitution, 
needs, or taste of the human mind. 

Although he represents both varieties of positivism, 
together with the sociological tendency which culmi- 
nates in Durkheim,! AuaustE ComTr may be regarded 
not only as the father of positivism in general, but as 
one who especially stressed its empirical motive. 


1 § 12. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 45 


Comte was born at Montpellier in 1789. He was 
identified as student, tutor, and examiner with the Ecole 
Polytechnique, which under the Restoration continued 
the scientific traditions of the eighteenth century. His 
Cours de Philosophie positive, containing his defense 
of the positive method and his famous three stages, 
placed him at once in the first rank of the thinkers of 
his time. Having from his earliest years a strong hu- 
manitarian and reforming impulse, and being an inti- 
mate associate of Saint-Simon,? he sought to find in 
positivism the basis for a social reconstruction which 
should serve as a safeguard against the disintegrating 
tendencies of revolution. This phase of his develop- 
ment culminated in the Politique positive (1851-1854), 
in which he introduced the “religion of humanity.’’ In 
his last years he devoted himself with piety and zeal to 
the development of this new cult, which strongly col- 
ored both his thought and his personal life.* 

Comte is to be understood as a sequel both to the 
French Revolution and to the scientific movement of 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like all 
French philosophers of the Napoleonic and Restoration 
era, he was moved by a desire to reconstruct social in- 


1Six vols., Paris, 1880-1842; 2d ed., with a Preface by Littré, 1864; 
English trans. by Harriet Martineau, 1853. Later writings: Discours 
sur | Esprit positive, 1844; Systéme de Politique positive, 4 vols., 1851- 
1854 (English trans., 1875-1877); Catéchisme positiviste, 1853 (English 
trans., 1858). 

2 Cf. § 3. 

3 This cult was organized in England under the leadership of Frederic 
Harrison (1831-1923). Among those more or less closely associated with 
Comte and his influence were J. S. Mill (§ 10), E. Littré ($3), Taine, 
Renan, Cournot (§ 3), and 8. Germain (1776-1831: Considérations géné- 
rales sur U Etat des Sciences et des Lettres aux differentes E'poques de leur 
Culture, 1833). 


46 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


stitutions upon a rational and stable basis. He believed 
that a coherent society could be established only 
through the general adoption of a coherent system of 
ideas, and by the unifying and invigorating influence of 
a common ideal. But that which had been achieved in 
the thirteenth century by the Catholic faith, could in 
the nineteenth century be achieved only by a new faith 
that should express the enlightenment of a new age. 
Hence the importance in Comte’s philosophy of his 
famous law of the three stages (les trois états), by 
which the human mind progressively reaches maturity. 
These three stages are respectively: the theological or 
fictive, the metaphysical or abstract, and the scientific 
or positive ; the last being the culminating stage at which 
mankind is at length emerging, and which must hence- 
forth afford the only acceptable and secure foundation 
for civilization and its institutions.! 

The theological stage is that in which man explains 
nature in terms of fictitious supernatural agencies mod- 
elled upon that kind of causation with which he is most 
familiar, namely, that exerted by his own conscious 
will. As the anthropomorphic way of thinking, it is 
primitive and spontaneous, affording a necessary first 
step to be improved upon later. Its highest achieve- 
ment is monotheism, which reflects the steadily grow- 
ing belief in the unity of nature. Metaphysics repre- 
sents a transitional phase of thought. The mind is still 
impelled to explain phenomena in terms of beings and 
agencies behind the scenes, but in the light of increased 
scientific knowledge these can no longer be conceived 


1 Positive Philosophy, trans. by H. Martineau, 1893, I, 2. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 47 


as operating capriciously or providentially. Natural 
phenomena evidently have fixed properties and regular 
effects. The earlier theological beings are thus reduced 
to substances possessing these properties, and the 
earlier theological causes to forces generating these ef- 
fects. They become mere abstractions, or hypostatiza- 
tions of their empirical manifestations. As empty and 
superfluous, these metaphysical conceptions then dis- 
appear, leaving only the empirical manifestations, to- 
gether with their constant properties and effects, as 
these are expressed in scientific laws. 

In its scientific or positive stage science is essentially 
descriptive rather than explanatory. As regards con- 
tent, it limits itself to the data of experience and must 
always appeal to these for its verification. As regards 
form, it seeks to conceive particular facts as varieties 
of more general facts, and to seize upon the relations 
of similarity and succession by which particular facts 
may be predicted. These relations are discovered by 
observation and induction, but once discovered they 
permit of the extension of knowledge to further particu- 
lars by deduction; so that a posterior: knowledge paves 
the way for a priorz knowledge, and theoretical science 
for technology and control. While science affirms that 
nature is governed by invariable laws, this generaliza- 
tion is not assumed or proved in advance, but progres- 
sively verified, as the laws are actually found.! Scien- 
tific knowledge is “relative” in a double sense. The 
data of experience are conditioned by the constitution 


1 Comte here agrees with Mill. Cf. Comte’s Discours sur l Esprit posi- 
tif, and below, § 10. 


48 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


of human nature, while the categories and methods em- 
ployed in science are conditioned by the general cul- 
tural milieu, and by the stage of evolution at which 
society has arrived. 

Next in importance after his law of the three stages 
is Comte’s classification of the sciences. He recognized 
six fundamental (theoretical, abstract) sciences, each of 
which arrives at distinct and irreducible laws of its own: 
mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, 
and sociology. There are several principles which de- 
termine this order of arrangement. In the first place, 
the objects of each in turn are more complex and con- 
crete than those of their predecessors. Thus while 
mathematics deals with nature, it deals only with its 
most simple and abstract characters; while sociology, at 
the other extreme, deals with humanity, which is the 
most complex and concrete of all existences. In the 
second place, each science in turn depends on its pred- 
ecessors, physics employing the laws of mathematics, 
biology the laws of physics and chemistry, and sociology 
the laws of all. This does not mean that sociology is 
reducible to mathematics, but is founded on it; mathe- 
matics being true of humanity, but only very inade- 
quately true. Nature is continuous and self-consistent, 
its several laws forming harmonious parts of one en- 
cyclopzedic system; but at the same time it is to be 
conceived as rising successively to different levels where 
new laws obtain.! 

Thirdly, Comte’s classification of the sciences repre- 


1 Comte may be said thus to have anticipated the contemporary con- 
ception of ‘“‘emergence.”’ Cf. below, §§ 13, 30. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 49 


sents the order in which these have achieved the “posi- 
tive’ method. Mathematics was the first science to be 
a true science, and has almost wholly escaped the taint 
of theology and metaphysics. Sociology is the last of 
the sciences to mature. Up to Comte’s own time it had 
been assumed that, whatever might be the case with 
other parts of the known world, humanity, at least, 
was inaccessible to the scientific method. Thus Comte 
prided himself not only on having raised the banner of 
the positive method, but on having been himself re- 
sponsible for the last and most glorious of its conquests. 
For, in bringing humanity within its rule, positivism 
annexes at one stroke the whole family of philosophical 
disciplines, such as logic, ethics, esthetics, and religion; 
and thus, by achieving a universal dominion, becomes 
itself a philosophy. Finally, as the sciences mount in 
the scale of complexity, their subject-matter loses that 
aspect of fatality which attaches peculiarly to mathe- 
matics. Phenomena such as life and society are rela- 
tively unpredictable owing to their complexity, and are 
relatively subject to human control owing to the large 
number of causes which are operative. Thus society is 
par excellence the field for the exercise of the will. 
Comte’s philosophy both centres and culminates in 
sociology. It is in terms of sociology that the traditional 


1The most notable omission in Comte’s classification of the sciences 
is psychology. This omission is due to his profound distrust of the in- 
trospective method, as abused by his contemporaries the “‘idealogues”’ 
(cf. above, § 3, and below, § 15); and to its incompatibility with the 
methods of the other sciences. He believed that whatever was genu- 
inely scientific in psychology could be divided between biology and so- 
ciology. Cf., e.g., Cours de Philosophie positif, 1869, III, pp. 530-589. 
His view may be compared with the contemporary view known as 
“behaviorism”’ (cf. below, § 29). 


50 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


philosophical inquiries are to be given a scientific form. 
Thus a scientific logic is that which describes the modes 
of thought which have actually been practised by man- 
kind in the several stages of its evolution; while a, sci- 
entific ethics will describe the social conditions which 
have given rise to the several moral and political codes, 
and will examine the relations which bind the individ- 
ual to the group, and the method by which, in the light 
of history, these relations may be cultivated. The in- 
nermost of all philosophical problems, that of knowl- 
edge itself, is not to be treated by the method of reflec- 
tion and analysis, but by an empirical study of the 
history of knowledge, science being viewed as an insti- 
tution or social activity. Sociology is thus not only the 
last of the sciences, but it is the science of the sciences. 
It provides the only possible centre by which nature 
may be rounded into a unified whole. Viewed as a 
manifold of objects, nature is boundless and incom- 
plete; viewed as a system of sciences, it may all be seen 
as an expression of organized humanity. 

Comte’s philosophy is socio-centric not only in its 
theory of knowledge, but in its goal of aspiration and 
object of worship. Man finds his highest vocation in his 
participation in a continuous and unified humanity, 
which is the most complex and noble, as well as the 
most imperfect and dependent, of beings. The individ- 
ual is united to society not by unconscious physical 
bonds but by his free intelligence and moral will. It is 
a unity of co-operation rather than of constraint. Hu- 
manity as the Great Being—the personification of the 
highest possibilities of human nature, is the proper ob- 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 51 


ject of adoration. Its heroes and benefactors are the 
objects of a grateful commemoration which both en- 
nobles the living and immortalizes the dead. 

Although Comte’s original position is empirical and 
realistic, it is clear that there are motives in his thought 
which tend in a different direction, toward an economi- 
cal positivism, and even toward idealism. Science at 
any given time is itself a historic and social product 
which reflects the existing stage of human development. 
Thus in the last analysis science will be what man 
makes it. Comte’s originality lay in his substituting 
society for the individual knower, or for an abstract 
epistemological subject, but there is none the less an 
ineradicable subjectivity in science. The Kantian solu- 
tion of the problem was to withdraw this subjectivity 
altogether from nature, and give it an a@ prior: and 
“transcendental” status. Rejecting this alternative, 
Comte could not escape the difficulty of making, at one 
and the same time, science the product of nature, and 
nature the product of science. There remain for him, 
as for all non-Kantians, only two alternatives. Either 
one must construe the advance of scientific enlighten- 
ment, the development of its categories and technic, as 
the progressive self-revelation of a pre-existing natural 
order; or one must suppose that nature develops parz 
passu with science, thus constituting a progressive re- 
alization of man. Although the general bias of Comte’s 
philosophy favors the former alternative, he tended un- 
mistakably in his later years to the latter. Science is 
an instrument of the will, and the will is governed by 
love. Mankind, which is the proper object of worship, 


52 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


is also the key to the understanding of the world; and 
the logic of the heart takes precedence of the logic of 
the mind. 


§ 10. Empirical Positivism. Mill 


JoHN Stuart Mitzi? became interested in Comte 
when his own general philosophical attitude was al- 
ready fixed, and in his work on Auguste Comte and Posi- 
tivism, published in 1865, he acknowledged him as an 
ally rather than as a master. With the Comte of the 
Positive Philosophy he found himself in fundamental 
agreement, while he deemed this author’s “subsequent 
speculations false and misleading.” * To Mill the essen- 
tial truth of Comte lay in his limitation of knowledge 
to the succession and similitude of phenomena, his three 
stages of intellectual development, his classification of 
the sciences, and his provision for a science of society. 
Mill differed broadly from Comte in being less sys- 
tematic, and both more logical and more psychological. 
This was due in part to the fact that he was an English- 
man, and in part to his education and philosophical 
sources. As an Englishman he was suspicious of specu- 
lation, and his relations with the British empirical 
school inclined him to analyze the data of experience 
rather than to trace the history of nature or of society. 

1 Politique positif, I, 447; II, 101-102. 

2 His principal works, other than those mentioned in the text, were 
the Principles of Political Economy, 1848; Essay on Liberty, 1859; Con- 
Pens st on Representative Government, 1860; and the Autobiography, 


3 Edition of 1907, p. 5. Mill first became acquainted with Comte’s 
philosophy in 1837; cf. Autobiography, 1873, pp. 207-213. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 53 


Similarly, as a philosophical technician, he was more 
interested in the proof of scientific knowledge than in 
the classification of the sciences. 

Born in London in 1806, and being the son of James 
Mill, he was reared in the tradition of the introspective 
associationist psychology, of which his father was an 
eminent representative. His early studies of logic 
brought him to see the importance of the problem of 
induction ; and his profound and original study of this 
problem resulted in the publication, in 1843, of his Sys- 
tem of Logic, generally regarded as the greatest of his 
works. The Logic is the application of empiricism to 
the method of science. In his Examination of the Phi- 
losophy of Sir William Hamilton (1865) Mill examined 
the other outstanding problem of empiricism, namely, 
that of the relation between perception and the external 
world. 

Meanwhile, Mill’s ethical, economic, and _ political 
views had been developing, first under the influence of 
the utilitarian school, of which he was a hereditary 
member. The founder of this school was JEREMY BEN- 
THAM,”? and James Mill was his most authoritative suc- 
cessor. This influence was, however, crossed and modi- 


1 This work underwent much revision in successive editions, of which 
the most important were those of 1850 and 1872. Mill acknowledged 
his indebtedness, as regards his logic and philosophy of science, not only 
to Comte, but to William Whewell (1794-1866), whose History of the 
Inductive Sciences appeared in 1837; and to Sir John F. W. Herschel 
(1792-1871), whose Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy had 
appeared in 1830. 

21748-1832. His most important work was his Introduction to the 
Principles of Morals and Legislation, published in 1789. The doctrines 
of this school can be traced to Hume and to Richard Cumberland (1631- 
1718). 


54 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


fied by two others. On the one hand, Mill was brought 
by a reaction against his early education, and by the 
cultural and romantic movement led by Coleridge and 
Carlyle,! to recognize the insufficiency of a purely quan- 
titative and individualistic theory of value. On the 
other hand, he was led by his studies of political econ- 
omy? to believe that the condition of the individual 
could be bettered only by a profound reconstruction of 
the foundations of society. Thus despite his individual- 
ism he was attracted to the programme of socialism. 
The fundamental principles of his ethics were set forth 
in his essay on Utilitarianism, published in 1863. His 
practical philosophy, in all the stages of its develop- 
ment, was influenced by his active participation in af- 
fairs. Appointed to the East India Company in his 
youth, later a clerk and examiner in the India House, 
and afterward a member of Parliament, he was trained 
to think concretely, and to translate theory into terms 
of practice. His views on religion, which were partially 
developed in his studies of Comte and Hamilton, were 
summarily but fragmentarily expressed in the three es- 
says on Nature, The Utility of Religion, and Theism, 
published shortly after their author’s death, which oc- 
curred in 1873. Mill was always more concerned with 
the truth as he saw it at the moment than with con- 
sistency or architectural unity; so that while his critics 
have found him shallow and incoherent, his admirers 
have found him to embody that candor and directness 


1§ 17. 
2 After Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Ricardo (1772-1823), 
Mill was the most important founder of this modern science. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 55 


of attack which is peculiarly characteristic of the genius 
of British philosophy. 

As an empiricist, Mill held that all knowledge appeals 
in the last analysis to the test of experience. Deduc- 
tive thinking draws conclusions by inference from a 
major premise, but this major premise itself, such as 
“all men are mortal,” is a universal statement of fact 
which must be obtained by induction. The fundamen- 
tal topic of logic is therefore the question how such 
universal statements of fact can be justified. They ap- 
peal to the invariable connections found in experience, 
and the first step is to distinguish the connections that 
are “unconditional” from those that are due to the 
presence of ulterior circumstances. This distinction is 
facilitated by experiment, which can vary conditions 
ad libitum ; and to perfect this procedure, Mill formu- 
lated his “four methods of experimental inquiry.”? By 
the method of ‘‘agreement”’ we compare situations hay- 
ing only one common antecedent A, and if we then find 
only one common consequent a, we may say that a is 
related to A unconditionally, that is, independently of 
the other varying conditions. By the method of “dif- 
ference” and its combination with the method of agree- 
ment, we compare situations in which a occurs with 
situations in which it fails to occur, and find that they 
differ only in that A is present in the one case and ab- 
sent in the other. By the method of “residues” we 
eliminate the connections already known, and conclude 
that there is a connection between the A left over and 
the a not yet accounted for. Finally, by the method of 

1 Logic, book III, ch. VIII. 


56 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


“concomitant variation” we conclude that there is a 
connection between A and a because for every change 
of A there is a corresponding change of a. 

But there remains a more fundamental and a more 
difficult question. Suppose it to be proved by the four 
methods that A and a are unconditionally connected, 
both in experience and in experiment, does this justify 
the generalization of this connection? If there were a 
limited number of cases and one had exhausted all of 
them, then one’s induction could be said to be complete. 
But the number of A’s and a’s is supposed to be un- 
limited. Am I justified because of their unconditional 
connection thus far, or within experience up to date, in 
concluding that they are connected always and every- 
where? The fact is, says Mill, that our reasoning thus 
far has assumed the principle of “the uniformity of 
nature.’ The proof of this principle he believes that 
he discovers in its very generality.1 Since it is pre- 
supposed as an underlying hypothesis in every particu- 
lar hypothesis, the verification of every particular hy- 
pothesis adds evidence in its support. Inasmuch as all 
laws exemplify it, it cannot be overthrown, but must 
always be confirmed, by the discovery of any particular 
law; whereas one particular law may be overthrown by 
another. Furthermore, its universal claims add force 
to the fact that no breach of it has yet been detected. 
In other words, if it did not hold we should be pecu- 
larly likely to know it. 

Mill followed his predecessors of the empirical and 
nominalistic school in holding that our ideas are all re- 

1 Logic, book III, ch. X XI. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 57 


ducible to sensations, and that these are given to us 
severally, being united by association. The virtue of 
Mill’s theory of knowledge lies in the persistence with 
which he attempted to reduce both the external world 
and the mind to these terms. The external world is an 
inference which is made by supposing that the rela- 
tions, such as causality, which appear among sensations 
hold also between the total manifold of sensations and 
some realm lying beyond them. Such an inference is 
possible, but gratuitous. All that experience strictly 
verifies is the belief that, given certain sensations, others 
will follow. Matter, interpreted in terms of actual ex- - 
perience, means nothing but these constant uniformi- 
ties, or these “permanent possibilities of sensation.” ! 
Mind is a set of possibilities of another order, differing 
in their arrangement, in their inclusion of thoughts, 
emotions, and volitions, as well as sensations, and in 
their being possibilities ‘for one individual alone. But 
Mill recognized here the peculiar difficulty presented 
by the fact that the mind, although a series of states, 
can somehow grasp itself all at once as a unity. We 
must either give up the notion that the mind 7s a 
“series of feelings,’ or accept the doubtful view that a 
series can be aware of itself as a series. He thus be- 
queathed the problem of the unity of consciousness as 
an unsolved problem to his successors.? 

In ethics, Mill, ike Bentham, took his stand on the 
principle that actions are to be judged by their conse- 


1 Hxamination of the Philosophy of Sir Wm. Hamilton, ch. XI. 

2 Jind., ch. XII. Idealists, such as Green ($17), rejected the view 
that mind is a series, while radical empiricists, such as James (§ 25), 
retained the view and sought to explain the difficulty. 


58 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


quences, and “‘are right in proportion as they tend to 
promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the 
reverse of happiness.” ! He also held, with Bentham, 
that the happiness by which the rightness of acts is to 
be judged is the general happiness, or happiness of the 
community, or greatest happiness of the greatest num- 
ber. The proof of this principle, according to Mill, lies 
in the fact that each person desires his own happiness, 
so that, each person’s happiness being a good to that 
person, the general happiness is “a good to the aggre- 
gate of all persons.” ? 

Mill differed from Bentham in two important re- 
spects. In the first place, he greatly softened the lat- 
ter’s selfish and pleasure-seeking psychology. Accord- 
ing to Mill, man comes, owing to his original sympathy 
and his acquired education, to desire virtue for its own 
sake. Instead of valuing it as a means to his pleasure, 
he values it for itself, and finds his pleasure in it. In 
the second place, he adds a qualitative to Bentham’s 
purely quantitative scale of values. Some pleasures, 
and particularly those which involve reason and virtue, 
are “higher”’ pleasures, not because they are greater, 
in respect of intensity or duration, but because they 
are preferred. Thus Mill sought to free utilitarianism 
from the odium which attached to it as a sordid and 
base philosophy that justifies the appetites and mate- 
rial comforts in opposition to the cultural and spiritual 
values. 

In his practical ethics Mill was a strong champion of 
personal liberty. By allowing the individual to develop 

1 Utilitarianism, ch. I. 2 Jtid., ch. IV. 3 Tbid., ch. II. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 59 


freely in his own way, restricting him only as may be 
necessary in order to protect others, one both promotes 
the happiness of the individual himself and enriches the 
life of the community. Through his recognition of the 
higher pleasures, through his individualism, and through 
the provision made in his political philosophy for the 
representation of minority opinion, he hoped to save 
democracy from vulgarity and from the tyranny of the 
masses. 

As against Hamilton and Mansel, he contended that 
the relativity of knowledge does not prove the incon- 
ceivability of God, but only the futility of conceiving 
God abstractly as the Absolute and Infinite. We cannot 
know anything except in its relations to ourselves, but 
it is as possible to know God relatively as it is to know 
nature relatively. He is especially vigorous in his rejec- 
tion of Mansel’s view that we must accept and worship 
a God whose nature violates both reason and con- 
science.! There is another alternative, which is to con- 
ceive God as finite, imputing to him only so much of 
the world as testifies to his goodness. Belief in a God 
who is the champion of righteousness gives to man a 
sense of partnership and reinforcement, and is thus 
morally fruitful, even though it be incapable of proof 
by the strict standards of the intellect. Religion, in the 
end, is an invigorating and comforting hope, rather than 
a reasoned conviction.? 


1 Fxramination of the Philosophy of Sir Wm. Hamilton, ch. VII. 
2 Three Essays on Religion. 


60 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


§ 11. Economical Positivism. Lange. Mach. Poincaré 


Empirical positivism may be termed “critical” in the 
sense that it limits knowledge to the field of experience. 
It is, on the other hand, deemed uncritical by those 
who believe that it ignores the part played in knowledge 
by the knowing mind. Empiricism is disposed to con- 
strue the subject as the passive recipient of sensations, 
and to interpret knowledge as reflecting an order which 
is given in experience. The knowing mind must frame 
hypotheses, but these are in the end tested and verified 
by their correspondence with experience; the knowing 
mind may even possess its ingrained modes of thought, 
but these are habits built up by association, and trace- 
able to the routine of individual or ancestral experience. 
Economical positivism, on the other hand, denies the 
possibility of this reduction of knowledge to what is 
given, and insists that knowledge must always, even in 
the last resort, betray a bias of the knowing mind. The 
positivist of this type will, like all positivists, hold that 
natural science is the supreme example of knowledge, 
and will be interested in it as knowledge rather than as 
offering an account of the world we live in; but unlike 
the empirical positivist, he will be concerned with its 
subjective or formal factor—with that part of scientific 
knowledge which is supplied not by experience but by 
the scientific activity itself. 

The German philosopher ALBERT LANGE,! professor 
at Zurich and Marburg, and author of the famous H1s- 
tory of Materialism (Geschichte des Materialismus, 1866), 

1 1828-1875 (§ 1). 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 61 


serves through the very ambiguity and instability of his 
position, as the best starting-point for the study of this 
type of positivism. Being the source of diverging ten- 
dencies, he has been universally criticised by those who 
have followed some one of these tendencies to the ex- 
clusion of the rest. Lange took as his point of depar- 
ture Kant’s Criteque of Pure Reason, which he believed 
to have proved once and for all that instead of our con- 
cepts being determined by objects, objects are deter- 
mined by our concepts.! Our knowledge, in other words, 
reflects the organization of our minds. He also held, in 
accordance with the strict interpretation of Kant, that 
the categories or forms of mental organization apply 
only within the realm of experience; that the natural 
sciences afford the sole instance of their application, 
and hence the sole instance of knowledge; and that the 
only valid categories of science, and hence of knowl- 
edge, are those categories, such as space, time, and 
causality, which serve to provide an exact mechanical 
explanation of nature. While he thus supported the 
method of science, he denied the pretensions of a ma- 
terialistic metaphysics, on the ground that, like all 
metaphysics, it illegitimately extends the categories be- 
yond experience; and on the ground that it must neces- 
sarily fail in its attempt to reduce mind to physical 
terms.? So far he might, with justice, hold himself to 
be no more than a rigorous Kantian. 

He clearly departed from Kant, however, in constru- 


1 Geschichte des Materialismus, 6th edition, II, 3. 

2 Tt can go no further in this direction than to establish a parallelism 
of aspects between the physical and mental (op. cit., 2d edition, II, 
374 ff.). Lange’s view here approaches that of Fechner (§ 14). 


62 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


ing the organization of the mind in physico-psychological 
terms, as a fact of human nature proved by such evi- 
dence as was in Lange’s time supplied by the new physi- 
ology of the senses. Here the orthodox neo-Kantians! 
refused to follow him, contending that categories which 
are employed to construct our knowledge of nature can- 
not be a part of nature, but must be “transcendental,” 
as Kant himself supposed them to be. Those who, like 
Lange, attempted to provide a naturalistic account of 
the categories definitely broke at this point with the 
Kantian tradition, and ceased to be affiliated with 
idealism. 

The second part of Lange’s philosophy was not less 
suggestive and prophetic than the first. Nature, or the 
world of knowledge, is common to all, expressing, as it 
does, the mental organization of the species. Over and 
above this realm of actuality there is the ideal realm, 
which is the free creation of the inventive or poetic 
imagination (Dichtung) of the individual.2 When 
ideals are mistaken for actualities error arises, but 
ideals are the legitimate expression of the: moral, 
esthetic, and religious nature, and as such may be com- 
pared with one another in respect of their value. This 
view that the claims of ideals are to be judged by their 
own peculiar standards, independently of their refer- 
ence to fact, relates Lange to Lotze and Ritschl,? and 
to the later development of the philosophy of value.‘ 
From this position it is but a short step to the view that 
truth itself is a value, and that even scientific judg- 


1§ 19, 2 Op.’cit., II, 540. 
$§ 14. 4§§ 19, 28. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 63 


ments are justified, not solely by their conformity to 
outer fact, but by their satisfaction of the will. Here 
again there is a division between those philosophers who 
interpret the will naturalistically and are the forerun- 
ners of pragmatism,! and those philosophers who, ad- 
hering more closely to the Kantian teaching, interpret 
the will in transcendental and a priori terms.? 

For the purpose of illustrating that widely diffused 
methodological positivism which rejected the Kantian 
deduction of the categories, but which nevertheless ad- 
mitted a subjective or voluntary factor in knowledge, it 
will be most instructive to select two thinkers who ap- 
proached philosophy through science.? This philosophy 
expressed the desire, on the one hand, to reduce the 
objects of science to the terms of experience, and, on 
the other hand, to reduce its categories to the actual 
technic of experimentation. It ought to avoid, on the 
one hand, speculative excursions beyond the given facts, 
and, on the other hand, logical schematisms and as- 
sumptions. It therefore represents the positivistic mo- 
tive of science in its purity. But whereas the empirical 
positivists believed that the form of science, and hence 
the order of nature, reproduced the general features of 
experience, the members of the present group called 
attention to a selective factor in the scientific activity, 


1 §§ 22-25. 2 § 20. 

3 Among the other scientists who exhibited the same general tendency 
of thought are the physicists Maxwell (§ 1), H. Hertz (1857-1894), G. 
Kirchhoff (1824-1887), and the physiologist M. Verworn (1863-1921). 
The most important of the philosophers affiliated with this tendency are 
Richard AvEnaRtus (1843-1896; Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, 1888); his 
follower, J. Petzoldt (b. 1862); H. Cornelius (b. 1863); and Karl Pearson 
(b. 1853; Grammar of Science, 1892). 


64 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


which was accounted for in terms of the organism’s 
need or taste for economy. 


Ernst Macu, born in 1838, was for many years pro- 
fessor of physics at the University of Prague, and after- 
ward, until his death in 1916, professor of philosophy 
in Vienna. His Die Mechantk in threr Entwicklung, pub- 
lished in 1883,! is a historical and critical study of scien- 
tific method, in which the author shows that in the 
course of its development mechanics has come more 
and more clearly to see that its purpose is “the abstract 
quantitative expression of facts.” It does not seek to 
“explain”? phenomena by referring them to purposes or 
hidden causes, but gives a simple and comprehensive 
account of the relations of dependence among phenom- 
ena.? His most notable philosophical work, the Analy- 
sis of Sensations, first published in 1886,’ attacks the 
question of the relations of physics and psychology, 
reducing their content to common terms, and defin- 
ing scientific method in such wise as to be applicable 
equally to both branches of investigation. Mach spoke 
as a scientist and disclaimed any intention of solving 
“riddles of the universe.’’ He was only clearing the 
ground for science by eliminating problems with which 
the scientist 1s not concerned. But he clearly implied 
by the ironical tone in which he referred to ‘‘sure foun- 


1 Translated into English under the title of The Science of Mechanics, 
1893. 

2 Tbid., p. 502. 

3 Beitrdge zur Analyse der Empfindungen. The 5th edition of 1906 
contains important additions. Both editions have been translated into 
English under the title of The Analysis of Sensation. His other impor- 
tant philosophical works are Populdr-wissenschaftliche Vorlesungen, 3d 
edition, 1903 (English trans., Popular Scientific Essays, 1910), and Er- 
kenntnis und Irrtum, 1905. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 65 


dations” and “unshakable axioms,” that what is good 
for the scientist is good also for the philosopher.! 

Mach’s boldest step was his resolution of body and 
mind into common elements. Here the way had been 
prepared for him by Berkeley, Hume, Mill, and others 
of the sensationalistic school, who had taught that phys- 
ical things in their knowable aspect may be reduced to 
the sum of their sensible properties. Many of these 
philosophers had also proposed to reduce mind to a 
similar congeries of feelings. But, save for a suggestion 
of Hume,? these philosophers had regarded the mem- 
bers of both complexes as mental. The physical object 
still lurked behind the scenes as a duplicate of its sensi- 
ble appearances, or as the activity of God, or as the 
Unknowable, or as a permanent possibility of sensation. 
Mach took the radical step of zdentzfying the physical 
object with its sensible appearances. There is then no 
difference between the physical and the mental save 
the type of dependence among elements which in them- 
selves are neither physical nor mental. The visible color, 
for example, is intrinsically neither physical nor mental; 
but in so far as dependent upon its luminous source it 
is physical, while in so far as dependent on the retina 
(as proved by its disappearance when the eyes are 
closed) it is mental. ‘‘ Physical” and “‘mental,”’ in other 
words, signify different systems of homogeneous ele- 
ments.? An element’s dependence on other elements 
within one or the other of these two systems is deter- 

1 Erkenninis und Irrtum, Preface, and ch. I. 

2 Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge’s edition, p. 207. 

3 Analysis of Sensation, English trans., 1914, pp. 8-17. The aggre- 


gate of these homogeneous elements in their bare qualitative differences 
constitutes the ‘pure experience” of Avenarius. 


66 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


mined by the method of variations, or by the observation _ 
of the changes of one element which are correlated with 
changes observed, or experimentally induced in other 
elements. When an element belongs to two systems, as 
when an element is both a sensation and the constitu- 
ent of a body, the two sets of relations are distinguished 
by keeping the one set constant while varying the other.? 

Mach was far from supposing that science is the 
mere observation or reproduction of the data of experi- 
ence. Its purpose is to “save experiences,” by achiev- 
ing ideas in which these are summarized and anticipat- 
ed.? It is governed by the purpose of economy. It is 
therefore primarily concerned not with the elements of 
experience, but with the “functional relations’”’* by 
which they are controlled. How far these functional 
relations, which appear as concepts and theories in the 
finished product of knowledge, subsist among the ele- 
ments themselves, and how far they are the creation of 
science, is not clear. They are observed in phenomena, 
abstracted from phenomena, and verified by phenom- 
ena. On the other hand, they are tested subjectively 
by their congruence with one another, and possess a 
precision and a logical structure which is approximated 
but never fully realized in experience. Their very con- 
venience as working tools is due to their being freely 
fashioned to the use to which they are put. In any case 
they owe their form to the necessity of restricting ex- 
pectation to that which is vitally important. They are 


1Qp. cit., pp. 344-345; Erkenninis und Irrthum, ch. I. 
2 Science of Mechanics, pp. 481, 490. 
8 Analysis of Sensation, 1914, p. 363. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM. 67 


a “product of the psychological need of finding sit way 
in nature,’ and their growing refinement expresses the 
demand for a more methodical adaptation that shall keep 
pace with the increasing complexities of life. 


The tendency of recent French philosophy of science 
has been to give greater emphasis to this subjective ele- 
ment which is recognized by Mach. The most impor- 
tant influence in this direction from the side of positiv- 
ism was that exercised by the great mathematician and 
physicist Henrt Porncarg&,’ who at the opening of the 
century published a series of books dealing with the 
method and value of science.? He was born at Nancy 
in 1854, was a student and lecturer at the Hcole Poly- 
technique in Paris—and afterward, from 1886 until 
his death in 1912, a professor of the Faculty of Sciences 
at the Sorbonne. 

In addition to the fact that Poincaré was a creative 
scientist of great theoretical acumen, and qualified to 
speak with authority of scientific motives and scientific 
procedure, the interest of his philosophy lies in his at- 
tempt to combine three aspects of science—the rational, 
the conventional, and the experimental; each of which 
has had its partisans, but none of which in Poincaré’s 


1 Erkenninis und Irrtum, ch. XXIII. 

2'The tendency is further represented by Gaston Milhaud (1858- 
1918), Essai sur les Conditions et les Limites de la Certitude logique (1894), 
and Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), La Théorie physique (1906). 

3 These books, constituting only the philosophical part of his numer- 
ous publications, were La Science et ? Hypothése, 1902 (English trans., 
Science and Hypothesis, 1914); La Valeur de la Science, 1905 (English 
trans., The Value of Science, 1907); Science et Méthode, 1909 (English 
trans., Science and Method, 1914); Derniéres Pensées, posthumous. 


68 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


judgment affords an adequate picture of science as a 
whole. 

As a pure mathematician who is himself to be cred- 
ited with important contributions to the theory of func- 
tions, Poincaré could scarcely fail to make a place in 
science for the element of universal and a prior: truth. 
This he provided for in his account of “reasoning by 
recurrence,’ which he believed to lie at the basis of 
the simplest branch of mathematics, namely, arithme- 
tic. That which is true of the number 1, and which 
when true of n—1 is true of n, is true of all numbers. 
This general theorem can be verified in the case of any 
given number by showing that if the truth in question 
holds of 1 it holds of 2, and if of 2, then of 3, and so on 
until the given number is reached. To establish the 
law for all numbers by this procedure would require an 
interminable and, therefore, psychologically impossible, 
series of syllogisms. The generalization of the law is 
possible only because the mind can see, once and for 
all, the possibility of this interminable series. We are 
forced to rely on a “direct intuition of the mind,” which 
“knows itself capable of conceiving the indefinite repe- 
tition of the same act when once this act is possible.” ? 
From this intuition, and neither from the principle of 
contradiction nor from experience, is derived all gen- 
eralization and universality. 

When we pass from arithmetic and analysis, or the 
sciences of pure order, to geometry and to physics, the 


1a Science et ? Hypothése, part I, ch. I. This principle is sometimes 
known as “‘mathematical induction.” 
2 Science and Hypothesis, English trans., 1905, p. 13. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 69 


principle of recurrence no longer suffices. There now 
appears the factor of convention or arbitrary definition. 
Poincaré was here influenced by the newer develop- 
ments of mathematics, and in particular by non-Euclid- 
ean geometry.1 The three-dimensional homogeneous 
space of Euclid and of common sense has ceased to pos- 
sess any unique validity for mathematics, but is seen 
to rest upon certain assumptions which are, from the 
point of view of mathematics, quite arbitrary. By 
changing the assumptions mathematics can with equal 
validity develop a system of four-dimensional space. 
A similar range of possibilities exists in mechanics, in 
which the Newtonian system, for example, is only one 
alternative; or in mathematical physics, as exemplified 
by the theory of energy. In this field of free construc- 
tion it is not strictly correct to speak of comparative 
truth. No one of these systems is a priort necessary, 
that is, derived solely and exclusively from the princi- 
ple of recurrence, which they all employ in common. 
Nor do they owe any allegiance to the order of experi- 
ence—which suggests them all, but does not dictate 
any one of them. They represent the free play of the 
scientific imagination, in which the mind, acting obe- 
diently to the principle of recurrence, is otherwise gov- 
erned solely by esthetic motives. 

How, then, is one to choose among these alternatives? 
To find a criterion we must consider the relations of 
science to experience. Here enters the third, or empiri- 
cal, aspect of science. Poincaré firmly opposed the ex- 


1 As developed by G. R. B. Riemann (1826-1866) and N. I. Lobat- 
chewsky (1793-1856). 


70 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


treme position of those who hold that science as a whole 
is ‘artificial,’ or controlled exclusively by subjective | 
principles, whether logical or esthetic.1 The physical 
sciences have in the end to submit to experimental veri- 
fication or the test of prediction. Only experience can 
establish their truth. ‘Empirical’ laws and hypotheses 
are determined altogether by the “brute facts” of sen- 
sation. Exact theories, such as those of mechanics and 
mathematical physics, are not to be proved or disproved 
in the same decisive manner, but choice is made among 
them according to their simplicity and convenience. 
Theories upon this level are always subject to change, 
while empirical laws remain relatively constant. The- 
ories are like languages or standards of measurement, 
alternative modes of representing the facts, which are 
all true so far as they do represent the facts; and super- 
sede one another according as they prove better capa- 
ble of representing these facts, and of assimilating new 
facts, without devious and unnecessary complications. 
So far as they cover the same facts, it will always be 
possible to translate these alternative theories into 
terms of one another, and thus exhibit their common 
nucleus of empirical truth. But Euclidean geometry, 
for example, offers a simpler account of human experi- 
ence, and is a more convenient tool for creatures who 
are compelled to deal with an environment of rigid and 
solid bodies, than non-Euclidean geometry, even though 
the latter contains an equivalent of every expression of 
the former. 


1Cf. his refutation of Le Roy, La Valeur de la Science, part III, and 
below, § 24. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 71 


What are these facts to which science is thus account- 
able in the last resort? Sensations are subjective, pri- 
vate, and variable. That which is common, communi- 
cable, and durable is the relationship among them. 
This order of connections is the only objective reality. 
Physical objects are no more than persistent relations 
among sensible qualities; and, similarly, scientific 
constructions, such as the ether, represent the fact 
that there is a natural kinship among all optical phe- 
nomena. 

We thus find in Poincaré a not wholly consistent com- 
bination of two views of the relations of knowledge to 
reality. On the one hand, science conforms itself to 
given facts, and rests on an experimental basis; while, 
on the other hand, it obeys an intuition of the inherent 
power of the mind and a taste for simplicity and har- 
mony. It can be explained only as resultant of these 
two factors. There is a similar and wholly unreconciled 
duality in his ultimate philosophy of life. Science can- 
not affect morality, since the latter determines our ends 
and the former only our choice of means. But the only 
worthy ends are those esthetic and rational ends whose 
supreme exemplification is found in science. Thought 
is only an episode in nature, and yet so far as nature is 
not thought—it is nothing.? 


§12. Sociological Positivism. Durkheim 


It has been remarked that naturalism tends by re- 
jecting the divine to exalt the human. A desire to find 


1 Op. cit., pp. 270, 271. 2Op. cit., pp. 4, 275, 276. 


72 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


some substitute for the ideals and absolutes of the op- 
posite philosophy leads to a special emphasis on society, 
because this provides some human sanction of truths or 
of values beyond the individual. This tendency cul- 
minated in the nineteenth century in the sociological 
positivism or “sociologism”’ of France, and its most im- 
portant representative was Eimite DurKHEIM,! who was 
born in Paris in 1858, inaugurated university instruc- 
tion in sociology in Bordeaux in 1887, and was called 
in 1902 to the Sorbonne, where he was professor of 
the science of education from 1906 until his death in 
1917. Durkheim’s? teachings have led to the creation 
of a school which constitutes one of the major tenden- 
cies of contemporary French thought. His influence 
was due in part to his commanding personality, in part 
to the bold and constructive character of his doctrines, 
and in part to their fertility for sociological research. 
Of the genuinely philosophical character of these doc- 


1This movement is continuously related to Comte. The forerunner 
of Durkheim was Alfred Espinas (1844-1922; Les Sociétés animales, 
1876). While Espinas anticipated Durkheim in his emphasis on the 
organic unity of society, Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904; Les Lois d’Imita- 
tion, 1890) proposed to explain society in terms of “‘inter-psychology,”’ 
or the influence of mind on mind through the force of imitation. The 
racial factor in sociology, together with the social application of Dar- 
winian conceptions, was emphasized by Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobi- 
neau (1816-1882), and the psychology of the crowd by Gustave Le Bon 
(b. 1841; La Psychologie des Foules, 1895). 

2 His most important writings were: De la Division du Travail social, 
1893; Les Régles de la Méthode sociologique, 1894; Les Formes élémen- 
taires de la Vie religieuse, 1912 (English trans., The Elementary Forms of 
the Religious Life, 1915). 

Its most eminent representative on the philosophical, as distin- 
guished from the strictly sociological, side is Lucien Lévy-Bruhl|(b. 1857): 
Morale et la Science des Meurs, 4th ed., 1910 (English trans., Ethics 
and Moral Science, 1905); Fonctions mentales dans les Sociétés inférieures 
(1910); La Mentalité primitive, 1922. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 73 


trines there can be no doubt. Society for Durkheim was 
not a mere incident of evolution, to be assimilated to 
more fundamental laws of nature, but a being suz gene- 
ris, which is to be taken as the centre and point of de- 
parture for human knowledge. Truth owes its objective 
and authoritative quality to the fact that it is an ex- 
pression of collective, as distinguished from individual, 
thought. The fundamental concepts of science, such as 
space and time, are “collective representations,” or 
products of social experience arising as the necessary 
conditions of religious rites and other forms of concert- 
ed action. Even the fundamental principles of logic, 
such as those of contradiction and identity, reflect the 
peculiar needs of civilized society, as is proved by their 
absence in the “prelogical” and “mystical” mentality 
of primitive man.! That difference which rationalists 
have emphasized between the universality of the princi- 
ples of knowledge and the particularity and relativity of 
sense is thus to be accounted for in terms of the differ- 
ence between the common, impersonal mind, and the 
private, capricious mind of the individual. Nor is the 
content of the collective mind to be reduced to that of 
individual minds, either through their psychological 
interaction or through the accumulation of ancestral 
habits. Societies are irreducible entities, which have to 
be studied in their own terms and can be compared 
only with one another. It is true that societies embrace 
and are composed of individuals; but once constituted, 
they behave in a manner peculiar to themselves. They 
have a property, which like those of chemical sub- 

1 Formes éiémentaires de la Vie religieuse, p. 18. Cf. Lévy-Bruhl, op. cit. 


74. PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


stances, is irreducible to the properties of their compo- 
nent elements. 

This unique property of a social fact, by which it is 
distinguished from every other fact, is constraint, or 
obligation. In other words, society is primarily a moral 
or religious (and not, as is sometimes supposed, a bio- 
logical or economic) entity. Hence the importance for 
Durkheim of ethics and comparative religion. Morality 
consists of certain established rules or customs, peculiar 
to a given historical group, and having a peculiar coer- 
cive power upon its members, who feel it to be at one 
and the same time both of them and over them. It is 
not a wholly external restraint, but rather the object 
of disinterested devotion. The moral good which the 
individual acknowledges is neither his own private good 
nor the private good of any other man, but something 
which he feels to be both immanent and transcendent, 
the very essence of himself and yet lying on a plane 
wholly different from that of any merely individual life. 
Morality is, therefore, not a calculation of individual 
interests, as the utilitarian would have it, nor an ideal 
formulation of what ought to be, but a social force and 
social fact that is capable, like other facts, of scientific 
description.! In other words, the group is a law to its 
members, and the standard of value is the genius of the 
group. Although this view evidently has conservative 
implications, it does not, Durkheim thought, cut off 
the possibility of criticism and reform. For there are 
aberrations and abnormalities which the group con- 
science will condemn; and there is a manifest destiny 

1Cf. Lévy-Bruhl, Morale et la Science des Meurs. 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 75 


for each society, which its enlightened members will 
perceive, and which by the light of reason they will con- 
firm and promote. 

The most profound manifestation of social life is re- 
ligion. This does not consist of beliefs, traceable, as 
Spencer and others had proposed, to the individual’s 
experience of nature or to his ghostly dreams; but of the 
force which men feel in the exaltation of the collective 
religious experience. The most primitive religious idea 
is the distinction between the sacred and the profane. 
Sacred objects, like the totem, are symbols of the group, 
and are invested with the power and awfulness which 
the group possesses for its members. Religion, like mo- 
rality, rests on the postulate that “ soczety can be consid- 
ered as a personality qualitatively different from the indi- 
vidual personalities which compose it.” ? 


§13. The Influence of Recent Science 


In any given epoch of human thought, philosophical 
naturalism will reflect those scientific generalizations 
which have altered the common beliefs of men, whether 
through redrafting the cosmic picture or through recon- 
stituting the fundamental habits of the mind. Thus the 
naturalism of the nineteenth century reflected the great 
scientific doctrines of mechanism, atomism, evolution, 
and the conservation of energy; and the great scientific 
methods of experiment and description. The opening 


1 Durkheim’s most important pronouncement on moral questions is 
his paper on “La Détermination du Fait moral,” in Bulletin de la Société 
francaise de Philosophie, 1906. 

2 Op. cit., p. 115. 


76 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


decades of the twentieth century have witnessed an- 
other revolution in science of the sort that will inevita- 
bly beget a new type of naturalism. There is nothing 
new or philosophically significant in the continuing 
progress of scientific discovery, or in the increasing util- 
ity of its technological applications. Whatever moral 
is to be drawn from these aspects of science has long 
since been discounted and assimilated to the modern 
European philosophy of life. Nor is there anything rad- 
ically new in the continuous refinement of the mathe- 
matical and physical instruments of research, unless it 
be a growing recognition of the extent to which the re- 
sults of science depend on technic, and may therefore 
be regarded as in Poincaré’s sense “conventional.” ‘The 
novelty of the new science lies not so much in the 
realm of method as in the realm of theory, affecting the 
constitution and order of the cosmos. It is unquestion- 
ably true that the general physiognomy of nature is al- 
ready so altered as to be scarcely recognizable by one 
who is familiar only with its nineteenth-century por- 
traits. What the new naturalism is to be, it would be 
folly to predict. The new theories have sprung up in 
different quarters more or less independently of one 
another, and yet are so radical and far-reaching that 
each will require to be corrected in the light of the rest 
before they can be said to form anything approaching 
a coherent system. This task of reconstruction, which 
must be left to science itself, is scarcely begun. The 
new theories demand, furthermore, so profound an al- 
teration in every-day ideas and images, that it will re- 
quire decades and perhaps centuries of re-education be- 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM V7 


fore common-sense can assimilate them and realize the 
cosmos which they delineate. 

Already the latest scientific revolution seems to have 
had two effects upon popular and philosophical thought: 
a new sense of cosmic immensity and complexity, and 
an obsolescence of Cartesian dualism. 

The new cosmography has greatly increased the 
range of scientific knowledge both in space and in time. 
The physical universe is now measured in terms of 
“light-years” (the distance travelled by light in one 
year), a unit where magnitude is appreciated when it is 
realized that light reaches the earth from the sun in 
eight minutes. The planetary system to which the earth 
belongs is conceived as part of the Milky Way, which 
together with “suburban”’ star-clusters has a diameter 
of, perhaps, 200,000 light-years. Far beyond this region 
lie the so-called ‘spiral nebule”’ which make up the 
rest of the cosmos. The theory of the curvature of space, 
which is one of the possible corollaries of the theory of 
relativity, has suggested that the cosmos is finite, and 
that light traverses its circumference and returns to its 
origin in a definitely measurable time, such as a thou- 
sand million years. The margin of error in such calcu- 
lations is proportional to their magnitude, but, how- 
ever doubtful and inaccurate, they have already altered 
the extensive scale of the human imagination. 


1The most fundamental of the new theories are those of relativity, 
the constitution of the atom, and cosmography. There is already an 
extensive literature on each of these topics, both popular and technical. 
The beginner will find the following books useful as introductions: B. 
Russell, The A BC of Atoms, 1924, and The A BC of Relativity, 1925; 
C. G. Abbott, The Earth and Stars, 1925; H. Shapley, Starlight, 1926. 


78 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


There has been a similar tendency in the minimal 
direction. The atom, once conceived as a physical ulti- 
mate, has now become a system of electrons. Chemical 
elements are no longer irreducible. But in the case of 
the small as well as in the case of the great there is an 
increased sense of having reached a limit at last, in the 
unit of electricity. The quantum theory teaches that 
energy or “action” (energy multiplied by time) is also 
discrete, or composed of irreducible pulses. Both elec- 
trons and quanta are measurable, the electron, for ex- 
ample, being reckoned as having a diameter equal to 
one hundred-thousandth of its atomic orbit, which is 
one hundred-millionth of a centimetre. 

Thus, at the same time that the totality of the cos- 
mos has become greater, its elements have become 
‘smaller; and this change of scale is accompanied in both 
cases by an increase of definiteness. Instead of the idea 
of the immeasurably great or small, or of magnitudes 
exceeding comprehension, the new scientific theories 
suggest a cosmos which in bulk is measurably greater 
and in components measurably smaller than any cos- 
mos hitherto conceived. The effect is both the sense of 
vastness, intricacy, and human dependence, and also 
the sense of an increased range and grasp on the part 
of the human mind. 

A second general feature of the new naturalism which 
is already recognizable is the questioning of the Car- 
tesian dualism. Modern naturalism has hitherto em- 
phasized the duality between the realm of inert and 
extended bodies, governed by physico-chemical (me- 

1 Cf. also § 30. 
NP 


NATURALISM AND POSITIVISM 79 


chanical) laws, and the realm of life and mind, governed 
by instinct, purpose, or thought; and has undertaken in 
some measure to reduce the second to the first. The 
present tendency is to view the duality itself as gratui- 
tous and false, and the very variety of the motives at 
work testifies to the strength of the tendency. 

Thus the theory of relativity has introduced a new 
conception of the relations of time and space, which 
suggests that physical things must be conceived not as 
essentially spatial and accidentally temporal, but as 
essentially spatio-temporal, as is the case with events, 
activities, and histories. Again, the idea that spatial, 
temporal, and mechanical properties, hitherto thought 
reducible to direct relations of position between matter 
and the absolute space and time which it occupies, are 
relative to the position and motion of the observer, in- 
troduces into the physical world itself that character of 
perspective or point of view which has been thought 
peculiar to perception. This change of view has rein- 
forced the tendency already so marked in positivism, 
to identify nature with the actual or possible content 
of sensible experience. At the same time, neo-vitalism,' 
while representing a minority party in biology, has 
served to accentuate the difficulty of reducing the phe- 
nomena of life to physico-chemical terms, and has 
brought clearly to light the factor of organization. This 
emphasis, in turn, has seemed to point in one or the 
other of two directions. According to one view, the idea 
of organization serves as a connecting link between the 
corporeal and incorporeal worlds, or as a generic fea- 

1 § 22, 


80 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


ture of nature in which the old Cartesian duality dis- 
appears. According to a second view, commonly known 
as “emergent evolution,” ! the difference between or- 
ganic and inorganic phenomena is only a special case 
of the sort of difference that occurs throughout nature 
on many levels. It is found lower in the scale in the 
difference between the physical and the chemical, and 
higher in the scale in the difference between the biologi- 
cal and the psychological. The result of the first view 
is that nature becomes homogeneous, and the result of 
the second view is that it becomes a graded series; but 
in either case the Cartesian duality loses its unique and 
central significance. 

It is a further effect of contemporary science, in so 
far as it ceases to provide arguments for body agaznst 
mind, or for mechanism against purpose, that natural- 
ism should cease to be a partisan philosophy and should 
tend to merge with philosophies of other types. This 
effect 1s especially notable in the rapprochement be- 
tween naturalism and realism.” 

‘The principal exponent of this view in naturalistic circles is C. 
Lioyp Moraan (b. 1852; Emergent Evolution, 1923). Cf. also the writ- 
ings of the English biologist, J. A. Thomson. 


2 As exemplified in the thought of B. Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and 
others (cf. § 29). 


PART III 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 
§ 14. Spiritualism in Germany. Fechner. Lotze. Hartmann 


Although naturalism of either the materialistic or 
the positivistic variety was the dominant feature of 
German philosophy just after the middle of the nine- 
teenth century, spiritualism and idealism had never 
been without their powerful advocates. Kant, whose 
Critique of Pure Reason had seemed to overthrow their 
claims, had, in his acknowledgment of the independent 
validity of the moral and esthetic forms of conscious- 
ness, really placed new weapons in their armory. The 
great romanticists and idealists, Fichte, Hegel, Schopen- 
hauer, and Schleiermacher, attended by a large follow- 
ing of lesser men, assured the continuity and prestige 
of the philosophy which championed the cause of the 
moral and religious tradition against the disparaging or 
destructive attacks made in the name of science. But 
while the pretensions of naturalism were thus disputed, 
the influence of science was felt even among those who 
refused to accept it as a philosophy. There was a gen- 
eral opinion that philosophy must make an adequate 
provision for the physical world, and that if it is possi- 
ble to learn about nature from mind, it is no less pos- 
sible to learn about mind from nature. This feeling led 
to a search for some common term by which both 
worlds might be interpreted.! 

Nature, according to this view, does not, as in ideal- 


1 This tendency was exemplified by A. TRENDELENBURG (1802-1872), 
who found such a common term in movement. Cf. his Logische Unter- 
suchungen, 1840. 

81 


82 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


ism, derive its relation to mind from the fact that it is 
an object of knowledge, but from the fact that it is in- 
herently spiritual in substance, and is governed by pur- 
poses and ends rather than by merely mechanical laws. 
The spiritualistic philosophy is, in other words, objec- 
tivistic and speculative, after the manner of Aristotle 
and Leibniz, and in continuation of the later phases of 
Schelling. Spirituality is a fact discovered by meta- 
physics, rather than an assumption deduced by theory 
of knowledge. This method of attack, in which philos- 
ophy begins with nature, and construes nature objec- 
tively, rather than in terms of its relation to the know- 
ing subject, signified the influence of the cult of science 
even on philosophers of the school opposed to natural- 
ism. Just as materialism offered compromises with 
spiritualism, through its emphasis on force and life, so 
spiritualism made concessions to materialism by ac- 
knowledging the existence of an external and indepen- 
dent natural order. 

Gustav THropore FEecHNER, who was born in 1801 
in Lauwitz, Germany, was a student of physics and of 
medicine, and in 1835 became professor of physics in 
Leipsic. His failing eyesight forced him eventually to 
abandon this professorship, and was one of the motives 
inducing him to turn in the direction of psychology and 
eventually of metaphysical speculation. As a scientist 
his most important achievement was the so-called 
‘Weber-Fechner Law,” ! according to which the inten- 
sity of sensation, instead of increasing in direct propor- 

1 Named ‘“Weber’s Law” by Fechner himself, in honor of his teacher, 
the physiologist, E. H. Weber. It can be most simply expressed by say- 


ing that the intensity of sensation increases as the logarithm of the 
stimulus. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 83 


tion to the strength of the stimulus, increases by dimin- 
ishing increments; in other words, the stronger the ex- 
isting stimulus the less will be the increase of sensation 
caused by an additional unit of stimulus.! This law 
marks the foundation of the branch of knowledge 
known as “‘psycho-physics’’; and the exact, quantita- 
tive method used by him to establish it gives its au- 
thor an important place in the history of experimental 
psychology.? In his Atomenlehre he agreed that, since 
physics conceives atoms only as locz of force or energy, 
there is no reason to assume that the ultimate constit- 
uents of the physical world are material or extended. 
Thus Fechner’s scientific studies supported the view that 
there is definite correlation between the psychical and 
the physical, and that the physical may be interpreted 
as inwardly psychical. This doctrine of psycho-physical 


1Cf. the Elemente der Psychophystk (1860). The more important of 
his other works are: Zend-Avesta, 1851; Uber die Seelenfrage, 1861; Die 
drei Motive des Glaubens, 1863; Uber die physikalische und die philo- 
sophische Atomenlehre, 1855; Vorschule der Aisthetik, 1876; Die Tages- 
ansicht gegentiber der Nachtansicht, 1879; Das Btichlein vom Leben nach 
dem Tode, 1836 (English trans., The Little Book of Life after Death, 
1912). 

2 Among the pioneers of this general movement, leading to the estab- 
lishment of psychological laboratories in Europe and America, the fol- 
lowing, in addition to Fechner, are especially worthy of mention: H. 
Helmholtz (§1) and Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), in Germany; W. 
James (§ 25) and G. Stanley Hall (1846-1924), in America. Wundt 
was an encyclopedic thinker who on his philosophical side may prop- 
erly be classed with the present group, as maintaining a spiritualistic 
realism in which he aims to do justice to the scientific view of nature. 
As with Fechner, Lotze, and von Hartmann, so with Wundt, psycho- 
logical knowledge, in the sense of the immediate revelation of conscious- 
ness, is superior to other sorts of knowledge, and justifies the belief that 
all reality is essentially psychical reality, namely, will. His chief philo- 
sophical writings were Hthik, 1886 (English trans., Ethics, 3 vols., 
1897-1901); System der Philosophie, 1889, and Hinleitung in die Phi- 
losophie, 1901. In America the influence of Wundt’s philosophy was 
represented by G. T. Ladd (1842-1921), while the influence of his psy- 
chology is represented pre-eminently by EB. B. Titchener, 


84 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


idealism or ‘‘panpsychism,” and the companion doc- 


trine of the plurality and hierarchy of souls, were de- 
veloped with great eloquence and speculative ingenuity 
in the most famous of his works, the Zend-Avesta; and 
their religious and moral implications absorbed his at- 
tention up to the time of his death in 1887. Although 
his temper of mind was strongly empirical, both doc- 
trines led him far beyond the limits of exact observa- 
tion, and involved the free use of the argument from 
analogy. He conceived reality in terms of experience, 
but he did not hesitate to transcend the field of actual 
experience. At the same time his ardent temperament 
led him to conclusions which he could justify only by 
their emotional appeal, and which he candidly ac- 
knowledged to be acts of faith. 

The difference between the physical and the psychi- 
cal, according to Fechner, is a difference of point of 
view. That which to itself is psychical is to others physi- 
cal. In other words, the physical is the phenomenal or 
extrinsic appearance of things. Behind the phenome- 
non lies not a dark unknowable, or an inert matter, but 
a, psychical life like our own. All things are inwardly 
or intrinsically psychical. The physical and psychical 
are not, as in the “identity theory” of Spinoza, two 
aspects of a third and substantial principle, but the 
psychical is the substance and the physical is the aspect. 
This relation is in philosophical speculation extended 
by analogy to all of nature, and all bodily phenomena 
may be assumed to be or belong to the outward aspect 
of some soul. 


1 Die Tagesansicht, p. 78. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 85 


But Fechner was no more a Leibnizian monadist than 
he was a Spinozistic monist. Souls are possessed not by 
each distinguishable physical element or phenomenon, 
but only by such systems or organizations of phenom- 
ena as form organic wholes, like the bodies of plants 
and animals. The evidence of a spiritual reality behind 
phenomena is to be found in their orderly connection.1 
There are, in other words, bodies in the physical sense 
which have no souls of their own, but are only constztu- 
ents of bodies in the biological and psycho-physical 
sense. Fechner believed, however, that not only plants 
and animals, but also the earth, the stars, and the total 
cosmos, are ‘‘bodies”’ of this type; and that one may, 
therefore, properly speak of an “‘earth-soul,’”’ and of a 
“soul of the world.” God is this soul of the world, or 
the all-inclusive system of nature as it is to itself. 

The relation of these souls to one another is a relation 
of inclusion. Just as the bodily man is a part of the 
physical system of the earth, so the soul of man is a 
part of the earth-soul, and the earth-soul in turn is a 
part of the soul of the world. As the soul of man em- 
braces its diverse sensations and ideas within one syn- 
thetic unity, so the souls of all creatures are enveloped 
and unified within the soul of God. This may be other- 
wise expressed by saying that the soul of God is related 
to the soul of man as the ground swell to the waves 
which it carries. Because of its comparatively high 
threshold,? man’s consciousness contains only fragments 


1In their ““Zusammenhang’” and “Gesetzmdssigkeit.” Cf. Uber die 
Seelenfrage, p. 268; Zend-Avesta, vol. I, p. 348. 

2 As proved by Weber’s Law, which shows that there are intensities 
of physical stimulation which induce no psychical changes. 


86 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


of the soul of God, the rest possessing to man only the 
aspect of externality, or body. God not only embraces 
the intermittent and isolated consciousnesses of all 
creatures, but gives organic unity and inward psychi- 
cal nature to the dead past and to the inorganic stretches 
of nature. All of nature belongs to God’s body, and is 
the outward manifestation of one psychical continuum, 
which is God’s soul. 


RupotpH HERMANN Lotzz, the most distinguished 
and widely influential German philosopher during the 
latter half of the nineteenth century, was born in Baut- 
zen in 1817. Like Fechner, his early training as well as 
his mature interests was divided between science and 
philosophy. At Leipsic he studied medicine and phys- 
ics, and in philosophy came under the influence of 
Weisse. His numerous writings reflect the wide range 
of his studies. In his Medical Psychology (Medizinische 
Psychologie, 1852) he made important contributions, 
both physiological and speculative, to this new branch 
of science, his most notable theory being that of “local 
signs.”’ This theory attributes to each sensory stimula- 
tion and to the motor response which it excites, a 
unique quality by which the datum of sense is assigned 
its proper place in the spatial system which the mind 
constructs. Lotze’s most popular book was the Micro- 
cosmus (Mikrokosmus, 1856-1864), a work notable for 
its briliancy of exposition and moral eloquence, in 
which the author dealt broadly with man—his natural 
constitution, his culture, and his destiny. His History of 


1 Blemente der Psychophysik, vol. II, p. 529. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 87 


Aisthetics (Geschichte der Afsthetik in Deutschland, 1868) 
was also widely read, and has exercised a notable influ- 
ence in this field, especially through his anticipation of 
the theory of “empathy” (Hinfiihling), according to 
which the enjoyment of esthetic forms, such as sym- 
metry, is occasioned by the perception of corresponding 
movements and tensions in the organism.! The most 
mature formulation of his system is to be found in the 
Logic (Logik, 1874), and in the Metaphysics (Meta- 
physik, 1879), written while the author was a professor 
at Géttingen. A third volume was to have dealt with 
esthetics, ethics, and philosophy of religion, but its 
completion was prevented by the author’s death in 
1881, a year after he had been called to the University 
of Berlin.? 

Although Lotze was trained in science and sought a 
reconciliation of science and philosophy, and although 
he was a most thorough and painstaking thinker, he 
was neither a rigorous scientist nor a critical philoso- 
pher. He had nothing of that cautious temper which is 
content with meagre results, provided they are method- 
ically correct. He was not greatly interested in theory 
of knowledge, which he compared to ‘“‘the tuning of in- 
struments before a concert.” * Though he created a 
comprehensive system he was more interested in its 
comprehensiveness than in its systematic coherence. 


1 Geschichteder Aisthetik, pp. 76-79. Cf. Médizinische Psychologie, p. 293. 
* His other important philosophical works were: Metaphysik, 1841, 
and Logik, 1843 (not to be confused with the works of 1874 and 1879); 
Kleine Schriften, composed of shorter articles and reviews, published 
posthumously. Works mentioned in the text have been translated into 
English as follows: Microcosmus, 1884; Logic, 1884; M elaphysies, 1884. 
* Metaphysics, Introduction, § ix. 


88 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


He was essentially a speculative metaphysician, who 
wished to reveal the real world in all its manifold as- 
pects. To this end he did not hesitate to employ and 
credit both sense-perception and reason, or to tran- 
scend both at the instigation of feeling and under the 
sanction of faith. The richness of his experience and 
the versatility of his genius led him to touch human 
life and culture at many points; and though it is easy 
to convict him of inconsistency, or even of dogmatism, 
his thought was more fruitful and stimulating to poster- 
ity than that of any other German thinker of his times. 

All of our knowledge, said Lotze, reposes, in the last 
analysis, on a faith in reason. There is nothing by which 
reason can be corrected save itself. Even the sceptic, 
in the affirmation of his doubts, betrays some ultimate 
and indemonstrable conviction. Ultimate convictions 
assume one of three forms. ‘‘All our analysis of the cos- 
mic order ends in leading our thought back to a con- 
sciousness of necessarily valid truths, our perception to 
the intuition of immediately given facts of reality, our 
conscience to the recognition of an absolute standard of 
all determinations of worth.’ ? These convictions are in- 
dependent of one another. Necessary truths do not 
yield facts, nor facts necessity; and neither necessity 
nor fact follows from the apprehension of value. The 
synthesis of these three forms of knowledge, in the con- 
ception of a universe which embraces the acts under nec- 
essary laws and realizes the norms of value, is again an 
act of faith. Philosophy cannot be expected to do more 


1 Logik of 1874, § 305. 
2 Microcosmus, English trans., book IX, § 2. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 89 


than to elaborate this conception, and to remove ob- 
jections that stand in the way of its acceptance. 

There are necessary truths which represent the na- 
ture of reason itself, and which it is the business of logic 
to formulate. These truths express themselves in the 
form of propositions, and, together with their compo- 
nent concepts, and the trains of reasoning into which 
they enter, they possess for Lotze a peculiar status of 
“validity” (Geltung), which is to be sharply distin- 
guished from that of existence. The major fault of an- 
cient philosophy was the confusion of logic and meta- 
physics, or the supposition that concepts are things and 
that the relations among concepts in thought are the 
same as the relations among things in reality. It is this 
very independence on existence that gives thought its 
freedom and constructive capacity; but this indepen- 
dence is reciprocal, and existence, not being subject to 
thought, can be known only by experience. It is ex- 
perience which determines what proposition, being 
logically consistent or in agreement with the necessary 
truths of reason, shall also be true of, or valid for, reality. 
It has been assumed as a part of the fundamental trust 
in the possibility of knowledge, that reality does so 
lend itself to being known in terms of logic; but which 
among the logical possibilities is applicable to reality, 
is discoverable only through the action of reality upon 
our minds in sensation. 

Lotze does not deduce the nature of reality either 
from logical premises (after the manner of rationalism) 
or from the a prior conditions of knowledge (after the 
manner of idealism). He thinks empirically and realis- 


90 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


tically of an independently given world to which the 
scientist and the metaphysician (unlike the logician) 
must accommodate themselves. But he believes that it 
is a part of the task of philosophy to show how it hap- 
pens that reality agrees with the forms of logic, and 
how it happens that it can be known empirically. He 
finds an answer to both questions in the nature of real- 
ity as represented by physical nature. As an orderly 
system of relations, reality can be known by logical 
thought, the propositions that are true of it being pro- 
jections, variations, or approximations of the laws that 
hold of it. As a field of interacting substances, of which 
the mind is itself one, reality can be known empirically, 
sense-perception being a special case of reciprocity. 
Perceptions are subjective, as are space and time in 
their perceptual form, but they are appropriate re- 
actions which fit the actions which evoke them, as the 
sword fits the scabbard, or as the meshes of the net fit 
the objects which are caught in it.’ 

Lotze’s metaphysics starts with the mechanical con- 
ception of nature, as a system of interacting corporeal 
units. These units, or atoms, as ultimate and indivisi- 
ble, have to be considered as active rather than as ex- 
tended. Nor is their plurality to be regarded as a final 
view of their relations. For action and reaction are in- 
conceivable if the interacting elements are independent. 
That one element should change in consequence of 
changes in another element implies that they are in 
reality only phases of one underlying substance, so uni- 
tary in nature that its several states are all reciprocal 


1 Microcosmus, English trans., 2d ed., vol. M, p. 349. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 91 


and compensatory. Since all of the elements of reality 
react to one another in a way that is determined, we 
must conclude that the nature of each is implicated in 
the nature of the rest, or that all are parts of one 
substance or vitally connected whole. Thus Lotze’s 
ultimate view of nature was monistic rather than 
monadistic. 

Having concluded that reality is a single substance 
within which all changes are reciprocally determined, 
Lotze had now to establish its spiritual constitution. 
To be real in the physical sense is to stand in dynamic 
relations, that is, to maintain identity, while inducing 
or suffering change. But we cannot grasp the meaning 
of these characters save in terms of actual feeling, and 
in terms of the unity of consciousness. To say of any- 
thing that 2¢ acts or suffers, implies something more than 
a change of state antecedent or subsequent to changes 
of state in other things. It implies that it ctself recog- 
nizes such changes as its own—as modes of its self- 
affirmation or of self-preservation. Only spiritual sub- 
jects exercise this function, and can be regarded as ulti- 
mately real.! Two such realities we are forced to recog- 
nize, namely, our finite selves and God, or the universal 
being which is the ground of nature. Whether there be 
over and above these realities a third order of natural 
substances cannot, Lotze thinks, be absolutely deter- 
mined. For it is possible to suppose that the objects of 
‘nature are but the modes of God’s activity upon our 
minds. But this reduction of nature to states induced 
in us by God cannot be argued, as idealists have con- 


1 Wicrocosmus, bk. IX, ch. III; Metaphysics (1879), bk. I, ch. VII. 


92 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


tended, from the general fact of the relativity of knowl- 
edge. Whether there were or were not a real nature 
external to our minds we should, in any case, have to 
know it in terms of our own states. The realistic posi- 
tion is conceded in principle even by Fichte, in his ad- 
mission of other spiritual beings, who, despite their ex- 
ternality to ourselves, are nevertheless known by us. 
Hence the reality of nature cannot be dismissed on any 
a priort grounds; and Lotze accepted it, with some hesi- 
tation, as affording the best explanation of sense-per- 
ception and of the facts of science. Metaphysics com- 
pels us to provide further for a universal spiritual sub- 
stratum, or God, as the ground of nature.' 

Lotze was primarily concerned to show that if nature 
is real, it must be thought of as consisting of spiritual 
beings below the level of man, and, like man, grounded 
in the universal substance of God. ‘Hither only minds 
exist, and the whole world of things is a phenomenon in 
minds, or things which appear to us as permanent yet 
selfless points of departure, intersection, and termination 
of action, are beings which share with minds in various 
degrees the general characteristic of mentality, namely 
self-existence.” Adopting the latter alternative, Lotze 
thought of nature as composed of beings which, while 
dependent on God in the sense of being modes of his 
activity, nevertheless exist themselves, as having both 
feeling and will, and in some measure that capacity for 
self-identification more fully manifested in the self- 
conscious ego. 


1 Metaphysics (1879), $$ 94-97. 
2 Microcosmus, bk. IX, ch. III (English trans., 1887), vol. II, p. 657. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 93 


Lotze’s philosophy of religion rests in part upon his 
spiritualistic metaphysics, which reveals God as the ul- 
timate substance of things, and as possessing in a super- 
lative degree that character of self-conscious personal- 
ity which is the essential qualification for reality. But 
religion is primarily an expression of feeling rather than 
of intellect. It reflects, on the one hand, the feeling of 
dependence, and, on the other hand, the acknowledg- 
ment of beauty and goodness. It cannot, therefore, be 
judged in the last analysis by canons of theoretical 
truth. It embodies judgments of value (the “ indemon- 
strable but irreversible declarations”’ of ‘‘ conscience and 
feeling”’), which are irreducible to judgments of fact or 
of logical necessity.1 It expresses, furthermore, a faith 
in the ultimate synthesis of fact, necessity, and value. 
According to the view with which Lotze concluded his 
Microcosmus, and which he offers as a ‘“‘confession of 
his philosophic faith,” God is a single power, “‘appear- 
ing to us under a threefold image’”—“namely, first 
some definite and desired Good, then on account of the 
definiteness of this, a formed and developing Reality, 
and finally in this activity an unvarying reign of Law.” * 

Thus Lotze represented a regard for scientific fact, a 
recognition of the universal necessities of thought, and, 

1 Op. cit., p. 719. Through his insistence on the irreducibility of judg- 
ments of value to judgments of theoretic truth, Lotze is affiliated with 
that later form of idealism which would reduce the latter to the former 
(§ 79). Indeed, Lotze himself concluded his Metaphysics with the dic- 
tum that “the true beginning of Metaphysics lies in Ethies.’’ Through 
his identification of religion with judgments of value, and his interpre- 
tation of dogmas in terms of their expression of religious experience, 
Lotze is related to the important movement in philosophy of religion of 


which the most distinguished leader was A. Ritschl (1822-1889). 
2 Op. cit., p. 716. 


94 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


beyond these, a speculative zeal for a metaphysical view 
which should satisfy not only the strictly intellectual 
demands, but the aspirations of man’s moral, esthetie, 
and religious nature. 


The characteristics which are common to Fechner 
and Lotze appear again in EpuaRD von HarTMANN,! 
the most original among the disciples of Schopenhauer. 
Again we find a receptivity to science, combined with 
a willingness to supplement or reinterpret it by free 
speculation, and by the argument from analogy; again 
we find a general tendency to metaphysical realism, and 
the more specific tendency to overcome the dualism of 
the physical and mental worlds by construing nature 
as of the same substance with spirit. 

Hartmann’s most famous work, the Philosophy of the 
Unconscious, which had a wide vogue in the ’70’s, is 
an attempt to construct a new monism that shall escape 
the opposite errors of Hegel and Schopenhauer. The 
former, identifying the real with the rational, was un- 
able to offer any satisfactory account of the irrational 


1 Born in 1842 in Berlin, died in 1906. Originally trained as an officer 
in the Prussian army, he retired for reasons of health, and became a 
private scholar, living in the neighborhood of Berlin. His most impor- 
tant work was the Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869 (English trans., 
1886). Among his other works are: Kritische Grundlegung des transcen- 
dentalen Realismus, 1875; Phdnomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, 
1879; Das religidse Bewusstsein der Menschheit, 1881. Among the 
German thinkers related to Hartmann through common descent from 
Schopenhauer, the following are deserving of mention: J. Frauenstadt 
(1813-1878; Briefe viber die Schopenhauersche Philosophie, 1854; Neue 
Briefe, etc., 1876); Paul Deussen (1845-1919; Elemente der Metaphystk, 
1877, English trans., 1894); Richard Wagner, the great composer (1813- 
1883; collected writings, 9 vols., 2d ed., 1887-1888); and Friedrich 
Nietzsche (§ 22). 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 95 


and changing aspect of the world; while the latter, 
identifying the real with blind will, was equally unable 
to account for order and purpose. The reconciliation is 
to be found in the conception of a spiritual reality that 
partakes both of reason and of will. This principle is 
called “the Unconscious,” because it underlies that 
very process of natural development in which conscious- 
ness itself appears. Hartmann accepted materialism, in 
other words, so far as this teaches that consciousness is 
conditioned by the brain, and argued that consciousness 
cannot be the cause of its own conditions. But the prin- 
ciple which produces the brain and the whole system of 
physical nature must nevertheless be regarded as spiri- 
tual because it exhibits intelligence. It resembles con- 
sciousness in that it acts as zf it deliberately adopted 
ends and selected the means necessary to realize them. 
Spirit, being thus divorced from consciousness, may be 
identified with the “force”’ of physics. It explains the 
biological phenomena of growth and of intelligent, 
though unwitting, adaptation. Without invoking the 
Unconscious it is impossible to explain even the phe- 
nomena, of consciousness; it is needed to account for in- 
stinct, for the bodily movements that do the bidding 
of volition, for the processes of sensation and associa- 
tion which underlie thought, for the spontaneity of hu- 
man motives, for the co-operation of individuals in 
society, and for the fitting of man into the greater cosmic 
purposes which he serves more wisely than he knows. 
As regards the issue between optimism and _ pessi- 
mism, Hartmann also attempted to mediate between 
Hegel and Schopenhauer. With the latter he held that 


96 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


existence is essentially evil, proceeding from the blind- 
ness of spirit, and not from its intelligence. The alliance 
of reason with will makes the existent world the best of 
all possible existents, but cannot negate the fact that 
to exist at all is evil, being invariably productive of 
more pain than pleasure. A purely rational principle 
would not have created at all. Since the world does. 
exist, the best that reason can do to mitigate the fact 
is to produce consciousness, and develop it to the point 
at which the evil may be undone by the cessation of will. 

Thus Hartmann’s pessimism, close as it is to that of 
Schopenhauer, does nevertheless give a certain meaning 
to the course of natural and historical development, and 
so allies itself both with the doctrine of natural evolu- 
tion and with the Hegelian philosophy of history. De- 
velopment is retained in the form of a sort of progres- 
sive disillusionment which reveals, first, the vanity of 
the goods of this world; second, the vanity of hope of 
a future life; and, third, that crowning vanity of the 
modern world which believes that happiness can be at- 
tained in the distant future by the agencies of civilized 
society. It is the duty of the individual not to withdraw 
from this enterprise, and contrive a private salvation 
of his own, but to identify himself with it, and so to 
share the suffering by which the Unconscious is to be 
redeemed. It is God himself who has committed the 
initial “folly”’ of willing to exist, through an inexplica- 
ble lapse of reason, thus liberating in the world the evil 
principle of will. ‘True morality and religion consist in 
the recognition of the evil of existence, together with a 
sympathy with God, and a willingness to share in the 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 97 


suffering by which God and the world with him shall at 
last be redeemed. 


$15. Spiritualism in France. Maine de Biran. Cousin. 
Ravaisson. Boutroux } 


In turning from Germany to France we must recall 
to mind the state of philosophy in the latter country 
at the close of the eighteenth century. The character- 
istic features of the thought of this century had been 
derived from England, but had reached their most ad- 
vanced development in France in the period of the 
Revolution. A reliance on the human understanding, 
together with a suspicion of mysticism, traditionalism, 
and authority; a tendency to construe the under- 
standing in terms of sense-perception and observation, 
rather than in terms of a priori reason; a preoccupation 
with the psychology of knowledge, rather than with 
metaphysics, and an effort to trace ideas to experience 
through reducing them to sensations; an emphasis on 
the human individual, as opposed to all types of uni- 
versal, whether abstract, metaphysical, or institutional; 
a, confident belief in the possibility, through the spread 
of enlightenment, of reforming society and reconstitut- 
ing the state: such was the prevailing creed. This creed 
was carried over from the eighteenth to the nineteenth 
century, or from the Revolutionary to the Napoleonic 
era, by the so-called “idealogues,” represented by Ca- 
banis and Destutt de Tracy, and so called because of 
their continuing Hume’s and Condillac’s studies of the 
sensory origin of ideas.? 


oh ff 


98 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


The reaction against the creed of the eighteenth cen- 
tury took many forms, which may be grouped broadly 
under two major ideas. The first of these is the idea of 
organic unity—the idea (as opposed to individualism 
and revolution) that the human individual belongs to 
something greater than himself, such as the process of 
history, or the corporate institutions of Church and — 
State, or the all-embracing cosmic Whole. The second 
idea is that of spontaneity, according to which man, in- 
stead of being merely the passive recipient of impres- 
sions from without, derives truth and authority from 
within, and finds the key to the interpretation of the 
world in the revelation of himself. It is evident that 
these two ideas, despite their common opposition to 
the creed of the eighteenth century, are in conflict with 
one another, in so far as the first inclines to a sense of 
dependence and the latter to a cult of freedom and 
self-exaltation. These two ideas and the conflict be- 
tween them constituted a central motif of German phi- 
losophy in the first half of the nineteenth century. 

To understand the course of French thought during 
the same epoch it is necessary to analyze further the 
second of these ideas, or that of spontaneity. In its 
broader cultural application this idea constitutes what 
is called ‘‘romanticism.”’ But there is a narrower mean- 
ing of romanticism which is intelligible only in terms of 
a further distinction. The spontaneity of the mind may, 
on the one hand, have reference to its cognitive opera- 
tions, and signify the fact that the mind supplies the 
forms or categories of knowledge from its own consti- 
tution. In this sense the Kant of the first Critique and 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 99 


all his idealistic followers were romanticists. But the 
spontaneity of the mind may, on the other hand, sig- 
nify the priority of will and feeling to the necessities 
imposed by the intellect.t. Romanticism in this nar- 
rower sense is the source, not of idealism, but rather 
of spiritualism. Nature is conceived not as the con- 
struction of the knowing mind, but as the outward 
manifestation of that essential reality which is directly 
revealed in activity and emotional aspiration. 
Romanticism in this second and narrower sense was 
indigenous to French thought. It had received a pow- 
erful impulse from Rousseau, who, although an expo- 
nent of the mind of the eighteenth century, was also, 
in his protest against the extravagant claims of sensa- 
tionalism and in his insistence that true morality and 
religion must spring from the “heart”’ rather than from 
_ the intellect, a major prophet of the age to come. 
French romanticism in the nineteenth century was thus 
originally a romanticism of the voluntaristic and sen- 
timental type, bred by an internal reaction against the 
intellectualism of the eighteenth century. This indige- 
nous impulse was thereafter confirmed by the intermit- 
tent influence of German romanticism of the same type, 
chiefly as represented by Schelling. At the same time, 
through the study of Kant, this current of thought was 
gradually blended with a romanticism of the intel- 
lectualistic and idealistic type. It remains, however, 


1Jn this sense, it is the Kant of the second and third Critiques who 
is the romanticist. There is a still narrower sense of “romanticism” 
(represented by Schelling and the Schlegels as opposed to Fichte), in 
which it signifies the priority of feeling to the moral will or to the con- 
straint of duty. 


100 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


broadly characteristic of French philosophy in the nine- 
teenth century that the tendency opposed to natural- 
ism should have assumed the form of spiritualism. 
The patron saint of French spiritualism in the nine- 
teenth century was Marine DE Brran, who, although he . 
lived at the opening of the century, did not assume a 
place of high importance until fifty years later. He was 
born at Bergerac in 1766, and died in 1824, his life thus 
embracing both the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic 
eras. But he maintained a certain detachment from all 
the revolutionary changes of his time. He compared 
himself to a miner whose real life was spent in the sub- 
terranean depths of his own inner consciousness. His 
vocation was that of self-examination, in which he dis- 
played that extraordinary delicacy of observation, and 
power to detect the nuance of a passing mood, which 
marked Rousseau, and is characteristic generally of 
modern French literature and psychology. He held no 
academic post, constructed no system of philosophy, 
published little, and owed his influence to his friendships, 
and to his rediscovery by a more sympathetic posterity. 
Maine de Biran’s point of departure was the doctrine 
of the “‘idealogues,” ? Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy, 
with whom he was intimately associated in the circle of 
Madame Helvetius at Auteuil in 1797. These thinkers 
had begun already to modify the traditional sensational- 


1 His only important publication during his life was The Influence of 
Halit (L’Influence de  Habitude, 1802). His posthumous works are: 
Nouvelles Considérations sur les Rapports du Physique et du Moral, 1834; 
(Euvres philosophiques, 1841; G’uvres inédites, 1859; Science et Psycholo- 
gie, 1887; Giuvres, 1920-1922. 

2§3. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 101 


ism of their school. Cabanis accepted instinct and un- 
conscious dispositions as predetermining the mind’s re- 
ception of impressions from without, while de Tracy 
insisted on the felt activity of will, as the source of the 
idea, of an external world. Maine de Biran developed 
both of these ideas. Impressed with the power of tem- 
perament and uncontrollable moods to alter the whole 
current of the mental life, he conceived of a level of 
“‘oure affection,” underlying conscious personality and 
intimately dependent on organic conditions. Self-con- 
sciousness emerges from these physiological depths, 
which can never be penetrated by clear introspection, 
but manifest themselves in somnambulism, or in the 
transition from the sleeping to the waking state, or in 
the twilight zone which surrounds the focus of attention. 
With the passivity of this subconscious mind is con- 
trasted the essential activity of consciousness itself. We 
know ourselves only as active: ‘The same reflexive act 
by which the subject knows himself and calls himself 
‘T,’ reveals him to himself as an acting force.’”’ The 
effects of my will I localize and distinguish from myself, 
but I could not thus localize my will itself without dis- 
tinguishing it from myself and so destroying it.! 

This free and self-identifying activity is the first prin- 
ciple not only of all psychology, but of all philosophy 
as well. It distinguishes waking consciousness from 
sleep, and the mental life of man from that of animals. 
As the basic certainty of knowledge Maine de Biran 
proposed to substitute for Descartes’s famous cogito 
ergo sum, the proof: “TJ feel or perceive myself free cause, 


1(Huvres philosophiques, 1841, vol. IV, pp. 244-245. 


102 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


therefore I am really cause.” (“Je me sens ow m’aper- 
cois cause libre, donc je suis réelement cause.”’') This 
same self-activity furnishes the bridge to the external 
world, since the subject as acting force is known as 
exerting itself against resistance.” It is also the source 
of the categories, such as force, cause, unity, and iden- 
tity, by which we understand the world. It preserves 
the individual existences from being merged in a unity 
‘of substance, and establishes a polar relation between 
the personality of man the created and God the cre- 
ative force. _ 

As in his earlier thought he opposed the active per- 
sonal mind to the passive animal mind, so in his later 
thought Maine de Biran provided for a still higher 
level of mind, or “mystical life of enthusiasm’’—a long- 
ing for ideal perfection, in which the soul is reunited 
with God.* Even in this religious phase of his thought 
he sought to obtain through spiritual exercises, prayer, 
and meditation, the confirming evidence of an inner 
experience. 

Maine de Biran recognized the outstanding difficulty 
of his philosophy. In immediate self-consciousness I 
know beyond doubt my own existence as active force, 
and the correlative resistance of something external to 
my self. But this revelation does not yield an enduring 
order of existence beyond my momentary and relative 
experiences. To complete his philosophy, Maine de 
Biran thus felt the necessity of invoking what he called 


1(Kuvres philosophiques, p. 249. 

* Huvres inédites, vol. I, pp. 47-48. 

® Hwvres philosophiques, vol. III, p. 20. 
* (Huvres inédites, vol. III, pp. 541, 571. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 103 


“belief,’”’ a faculty which apprehends the absolute, and 
provides a framework of reality into which the deliv- 
erances of the individual consciousness can be fitted.! 
This need of finding an escape for metaphysical purposes 
from the limitations of the psychological method be- 
comes the dominant motive in the philosophy of Cousin. 


Unlike Maine de Biran, Vicror Cousin exercised a 
profound influence upon his times, but has been more 
lightly esteemed by posterity. His influence was due as 
much to the circumstances of his career, and his relation 
to his times, as to the quality of his genius. Born in 
1792, he became professor at the Sorbonne in 1815, and 
from 1830 to 1851, as director of the Ecole Normale 
Supérieure and minister of state, he became a sort of 
educational dictator, being thus enabled to give to his 
teachings an official sanction and prestige of orthodoxy. 
To the influence of position was added an eloquence 
and enthusiasm which made the delivery of his famous 
lectures on The True, the Beautiful, and the Good in 1818 
a memorable event in the lives of his contemporaries.? 
His learning and keen interest in the history of philoso- 
phy, and his acquaintance with the thought of Ger- 
many, gained through his studies and travels in that 

1Cf. Science et Psychologie, pp. 163-186. 

2 This work (Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien) was first published in 1837, 
and later reissued in a succession of revised editions. It was translated 
into English in 1853. His Q@uwvres complétes were published in 22 vol- 
umes, 1846-1847. Other works translated into English: Elements of 
Psychology, 1856; History of Modern Philosophy, 1852; Philosophy of the 
Beautiful, 1849. Cousin’s thought exerted a powerful influence in Eng- 
land and America, where it combined with German influences (espe- 


cially that of Schelling) to provoke the romanticist tendency, He died 
in 1867, after his influence had already begun to wane. 


104 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


country, greatly broadened the outlook of French phi- 
losophy. Above all, he satisfied the need, so keenly felt 
in his epoch after years of disillusionment and narrow 
empiricism, for an edifying and inspiring creed, and for 
a philosophy on the grand scale. 

The school of Cousin is commonly known as “eclec- 
ticism,”’ signifying an acceptance of the essential truths 
contained in all the great systems of the past, and their 
union in one all-embracing system. In opposition to the 
destructive temper of scepticism and the cautious tem- 
per of empiricism, the term implies a disposition to 
credit as at least partially true all of the ideas which 
have obtained a strong hold upon human belief. In 
opposition to original speculation, it implies that the 
office of philosophy is architectonic rather than creative. 

But Cousin saw, nevertheless, that the true historic 
doctrines cannot be distinguished from the false with- 
out some independent criterion, and that they cannot 
be combined without being re-thought. He preferred, 
therefore, to regard himself as the exponent of ‘‘spiri- 
tualism,” the philosophy which is “the natural ally of 
all good causes.” ! This philosophy he sought to estab- 
lish by the study of the mind, or by psychology, which 
he regarded as the “grand method of modern philoso- 
phy,” ? inaugurated by Descartes. The empiricists, 
Locke and Condillac, who have followed the psychologi- 
cal method, are to be preferred to those who, like Spi- 
noza, have departed from it; but while they are to be 
praised for their psychology they are to be condemned 


1 Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien, edition of 1881, p. iv. 
2 Ibid., p. 3. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 105 


for their empiricism. They have construed the mind 
too narrowly in terms of sensibility and have neglected 
the reason. Among those who have by a deepening of 
the psychological method brought to light the universal 
and necessary principles on which science and meta- 
physics, religion and common-sense, alike repose, Reid 
was ‘the most irreproachable,”’ and Kant ‘the most 
systematic.” ! Cousin had made the acquaintance of 
the Scottish philosopher Reid, through his teacher and 
acknowledged master Roger Collard,? and with the 
former’s cast of mind, as well as with his doctrines, he 
always felt a peculiar affinity. 

To Kant, Cousin devoted considerable attention. He 
credited him with having shown by the psychological 
method that space, time, causality, substance, and the 
other categories are necessary principles of reason un- 
derived from sense. He condemned him, however, for 
having attached these principles to the human mind 
and limited their application to the sphere of sensation. 
The outcome of Kant’s view is a scepticism even more 
destructive than that scepticism of Hume which he had 
undertaken to overthrow. The principles of reason are 
not mere subjective necessities. They appear to be so 
only when in reflection the mind finds itself incapable of 
rejecting them. Reflection is a secondary process of 
mind, which implies a direct and positive apprehension 
of principles, a “spontaneous intuition,” “a sphere of 
light and of peace where reason perceives the truth .. . 
because God has made reason to perceive it as he has 
made the eye to see.”* This spontaneous intuition is 
1Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien, p. 18. *%§8. Jbid., pp. 40, 41, 61. 


106 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


the true logic of nature, which is revealed, as Reid had 
rightly maintained, to common-sense, and which neither 
needs nor is capable of any proof. These same princi- 
ples lead us to God,! for they cannot be thought either 
to exist by themselves or to reside in particular exis- 
tences, or in the human mind. They are the thoughts of 
God, reflected in the laws of nature, and serving as a 
link between man and God.? 


Although Cousin represented the romantic reaction 
against the eighteenth century, and regarded himself 
as the champion of the spiritualistic revival, he was 
promptly repudiated by the more advanced exponents 
of these very tendencies. His chief critic was FELIX 
Ravaisson-Mo.uien, whose Report on Philosophy in 
France in the Nineteenth Century (1867) contained a 
vigorous attack upon both eclecticism and positivism, 
and a new spiritualistic confession of faith. Ravaisson 
was born in 18138, and in his early youth came under 
the influence both of Cousin and of Schelling, whose lec- 
tures he attended at Munich.*? He found his chief phil- 
osophical inspiration, however, in Aristotle, Leibniz, 
and, above all, in Maine de Biran, for whose canoniza- 
tion he was chiefly responsible. He was a man of pro- 
found erudition and wide experience, not only steeped 
in the history of philosophical and religious thought, 
but, as Curator of the Department of Antiquities in the 


1 As do conscience and the sense of beauty, by other routes. 

2 Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien, pp. 67-102. 

3 He here formed the acquaintance of CHarLEs SEcr&TAN (1815-1895; 
Philosophie de la Inberté, 1848-1849), whose development was in many 
respects parallel to his own, and who became the most distinguished 
Swiss philosopher of the second half of the century. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 107 


Louvre from 1874 to his death in 1900, both a learned 
archeologist and an appreciative connoisseur in the field 
of the fine arts. His strictly philosophical writings were 
few, and like his German contemporaries of the roman- 
tic era he sought in philosophy not a technical solution 
of its own traditional problems, but rather a unified in- 
terpretation of all culture. 

To Ravaisson, Cousin’s philosophy was only a “half- 
spiritualism” (demi-spiritualisme).2 Cousin had, it is 
true, taken a step beyond empiricism by introducing the 
principles of reason, and by paying homage to the su- 
premacy of spirit. But he had still proceeded, after the 
manner of the eighteenth century, to observe and ana- 
lyze zdeas. To sensations he had added abstract con- 
ceptions, but these bore no intelligible relation either 
to the soul, or to nature, or to God. Ideas conceived as 
passive states of the mind, whether of sensation or of 
reason, remained but external and disconnected ap- 
pearances of some underlying reality whose nature re- 
mained unknown, and whose existence had to be dog- 
matically affirmed. What was needed was a metaphysi- 
cal insight that should, on the one hand, reveal the 
essential nature of reality, and, on the other hand, serve 
as an explanatory key to the universe. This Ravaisson 
found neither in the inductive, observational method of 
the British and French schools of the eighteenth cen- 


1 Besides the above-mentioned Report (Rapport sur la Philosophie en 
France, 1867) his chief philosophical writings were: De l’Habitude, 1838 
(Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1894); Essat sur la Métaphysique 
d’Aristote, vol. I, 1837, vol. II, 1846; ‘“‘Métaphysique et Morale,” in 
Revue des deux Mondes, 1893. 

2 Rapport sur la Philosophie en France, p. 19. 


108 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


tury, nor in the dialectic and intellectual intuition of 
the German schools of the nineteenth century, but in 
Maine de Biran. This writer, however, had not realized 
the full significance of his own discovery. He had point- 
ed to the mind’s immediate awareness of itself as will, 
but, by unduly stressing the experience of effort, he had 
failed to see that the essence of will is desire, and that 
desire is essentially aspiration or love—a striving 
toward perfection. 

Spirit so construed furnishes the desired key by which 
the diverse aspects of reality and experience can be 
united. Spiritual activity is not an attribute of sub- 
stance, it 7s substance: to be is to act.! To will and to 
think are the same thing, since thought is an operation, 
which aims to complete and unify experience: to be is 
to think.? When thought is thus construed as creative 
synthesis, there is no longer any division between 
knowledge and art.’ Spirit, so conceived, is seen to be 
the essence of nature. The organic sciences have always 
found it necessary to employ the conception of finality, 
or to construe the parts in terms of the whole.* But 
even the inorganic sciences must in the end resort to 
the same spiritual categories. Inanimate nature differs 
from life and consciousness only in the degree of its 
spirituality. All movement is at bottom a tendency ; 
inertia is a tendency to maintain or conserve motion. 
This tendency for any activity to persist gives rise to 
habit; and the aspect of automatism presented by in- 


1 Rapport, p. 241. 2 Tbid., p. 259. 8 Ibid., p. 236. 
‘ Referring to the ideas of Claude Bernard (§ 3). 
5 Rapport, pp. 249, 250, 254. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 109 


organic nature is to be construed, after the analogy of 
habit, as a degraded or fossilized will.1 Only active and 
self-identical spirits can form habits, and nature can 
be understood only as a by-product of God. Physical 
nature is “a refraction or dispersion” of the divine 
spirit.2, Unwilling to recognize any alien principle, and 
finding a purely negative principle unacceptable, Ra- 
vaisson conceives the inferior order of nature to be the 
voluntary product of God, who has deprived existence 
of perfection in order that it may seek and recover it. 

Spirit is both determined and free; determined in 
that the end is not possible without the means, which 
are its necessary conditions; free in that the end is de- 
sired and chosen, and is unpredictable from the means. 
It is only after the fact and regressively that the rela- 
tion of antecedents to consequents can be seen to be 
necessary. In its forward direction change is governed © 
by “a tendency to perfection, to good, and to beauty,” 
which is the very essence of freedom, because it ex- 
presses the natural bias and true will of every creature.‘ 


Ravaisson having designed and constructed the new 
spiritualism, Emme Bourrovux undertook to defend it 
against the rising tide of naturalism. Born in 1845, at 
Montrouge, he entered upon his career in that decade 
of the 60’s when (despite the reign of eclecticism in 
official and academic circles) materialism and positivism 
were gaining many adherents in France as well as 
abroad. Science spoke with an authority that could 


_ Cf. the author’s work, De l’Habitude. 
2 Tbid., p. 255. 3 [bid., pp. 262-263. 4 Tbid., pp. 250-254. 


110 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


not be ignored; it was necessary to take cognizance of 
it and meet it on its own grounds. This Boutroux un- 
dertook to do in the most important of his books, On 
the Contingency of the Laws of Nature, published in 
1874.! Like Ravaisson, he was conversant with con- 
temporary thought in Germany, spending the years 
1868-1870 as a student at Heidelberg. He exerted a 
direct personal influence upon his younger contempo- 
raries through his teaching at the Ecole Normale 
Supérieure and Sorbonne, and through his directorship 
(from 1902 until his death in 1922) of the Fondation 
Thiers. 

There are, according to Boutroux, three types of ne- 
cessity and determination that seem to exclude the real- 
ity of spirit, with its prerogative of freedom: logico- 
mathematical or deductive necessity, of the Cartesian 
type; categorical necessity, of the Kantian type; and 
empirical inductive uniformities, of the Humian type.” 
In each case, however, something is left wnnecessitated, 
or ‘“‘contingent.’”’ Deductive necessity leaves existence 
itself contingent, since it deals only with abstract possi- 
bilities, which may or may not be realized, and which 
if they are realized are never realized exactly.* Further- 
more, even mathematics starts from unproved postu- 
lates, and as physics is not deducible from mathematics, 
so each successive science in the scale of complexity 

1 Translated into English in 1916, the French title being De la Con- 
tingence des Lois de la Nature. His other important works (all of which 
have been translated into English) were De l’Idée de Loi naturelle dans 
la Science et la Philosophie contemporaines, 1895; Questions de Morale et 
d’ Education, 1895; La Science et la Religion dans la Philosophie contem- 


poraine, 1908; and various studies in the history of philosophy. 
2 De la Contingence, etc., ch. I. 3 Jbid., ch. II. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 111 


presents novelties which are underivable from the last. 
In the second place, Kant is correct in denying that na- 
ture imposes her laws upon our minds, but mistaken in 
supposing that our minds impose a set of predetermined 
categories upon nature. The categories themselves are 
an adaptation both of nature to mind and of mind to 
nature, an “accord” or ‘‘compromise”’ between the 
two.? There remains the empirical sequence of events, 
the routine of nature, in which an object is determined 
by the sum of its actual conditions. But here there is 
no necessity at all. The facts being given, we can grasp 
their relations and predict their recurrence; but we do 
not see why they must be so, nor could we have pre- 
dicted their original occurrence. Our knowledge is of 
existences, but it is experimental and a posteriori. All 
of these elements of contingency increase as we rise in 
the hierarchy of the sciences from the more abstract 
level of mathematics to the more concrete levels of life 
and mind. 

The element of contingency in science opens the way 
for metaphysics and invites its aid. From this point 
Boutroux restates and amplifies the thought of Ravais- 
son. That which from the standpoint of science is nega- 
tive, a mere failure to complete its programme, is from 
the standpoint of metaphysics a positive and explana- 
tory principle. Science admits contingency as a limit- 
ing factor, metaphysics construes it in terms of the free, 
creative activity of spirit. Spirit is that which is at once 
most concrete and most free. The failure of logic and 


1 De la Contingence, etc., ch. III-VII. 
3 L’ Idée de Loi naturelle, pp. 137-139. 


112 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


the plasticity of the categories may now be seen as due 
to their failure to express the whole of spirit, which is 
not mere intellect, but also feeling and will; having 
zesthetic and moral, as well as scientific, aspirations.! 
The unruliness of nature, its insubordination to laws, 
may now be understood in terms of that which is rec- 
ognized as the essence of spirit. 

But a spiritualistic metaphysics accounts for the reg- 
ularities of nature as well as for its irregularities, or for 
just that degree of regularity which nature appears to 
have. For spirit is not disorderly, even though it is 
free. In the first place, it is directed toward the end 
which it pursues, and acquires thereby a steadiness and 
coherence which make it as predictable as though it 
were mechanically necessitated.? In the second place, 
as Ravaisson had said, it forms habits, or tends to ‘‘im- 
mobilize itself in any form which it once assumes.” 
Although its acts are inaugurated by reason, they tend 
to become detached therefrom and to be propelled by 
one another. But habit (or mechanical nature), though 
a degraded state, is a state of spirit none the less.’ 
Finally, it is only by the spiritualistic metaphysics that 
one can explain the fact that science, the creation of 
spirit, can fit the facts, and apply itself successfully to 
reality. We can explain this only if we suppose that 
there is a kinship between the human mind and nature, 
or that there is something of thought in nature, just as 
there is something of movement in mind.* Thus science, 

1 Science et Religion, p. 357. 
2 De la Contingence, etc., pp. 23, 70, 140. 


8 Ibid., pp. 44, 162, 169, 170. 
4 L’Idée de Loi naturelle, pp. 19, 50, 133, 143. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 113 


instead of being opposed to spirit, appears as one of its 
creative activities; expressing, together with art and 
morality, that aspiration toward perfection which, as a 
community of wills and an organized, historic institu- 
tion, constitutes religion.’ 


§ 16. Idealism in France. Renouvier. Lachelier 


Spiritualism, both in Germany and in France, owed 
its force to the fact that it offered a positive account of 
reality. It transcended the relativities of phenomenal 
appearance not by affirming an opaque (unknown or 
material) underlying substance, but by depicting the 
inwardness of things luminously, as well as auspiciously, 
in terms of the intuition of spiritual activity. But in 
projecting this spiritual nwardness beyond phenomena 
and attributing it to nature and to God, it was neces- 
sary to make use of the argument from analogy. In 
the last analysis it was interpretation—plausible and 
meaningful, but highly speculative. The tendency from 
spiritualism to idealism expressed the desire to be more 
rigorous, or to carry over into the metaphysics of the 
nineteenth century the critical temper of the eighteenth, 
especially as exemplified by Kant. 

In France this tendency found its most notable ex- 
ponent in CHARLES Renovuvier, who stood somewhat 


1'To the spiritualist school belong also Alfred Fourmife (1838-1912; 
La Liberté et le Déterminisme, 1872; L’Evolutionnisme des Idées-forces, 
1890), who sought to reconcile spiritualism and positivism through the 
conception of the tendency of ideas to realize themselves in action; and 
Jean Marie Guyau (1854-1888; Hsquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation 
ni Sanction, 1885), who took “‘life,’”’ or the will to live, as his ultimate 
and reconciling conception, thus anticipating Nietzsche and Bergson 
(§§ 22, 23). 


114 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


apart from contemporary schools and currents of 
thought, as well as from academic circles, and struggled 
indefatigably during his long career to reconcile his 
moral and religious faith with his intellectual conscience. 
He did not limit himself to indubitable fact or intellec- 
tual certainty, but he sought scrupulously to define 
their limits, and to acknowledge explicitly the excur- 
sions he felt justified in making beyond them. The 
systematic works on which his fame chiefly rests were 
not published until he reached middle age. Born in 
1815, his first period was spent in assimilating the phi- 
losophy of his age, especially that of Comte and Saint- 
Simon, and in mastering Descartes. His early publi- 
cations expressed his historical interests together with 
a, republican and socialistic enthusiasm inspired by the 
stirring events of 1848. His middle period, which co- 
incided with the Second Empire and the defeat of his 
political hopes, was devoted to the writing and publi- 
cation of his EHssais de Critique générale, of which the 
first edition appeared in the years 1854-1869, and a 
second and revised edition: in the years 1875-1886. 
This, his so-called “neo-criticism,’ was inspired by 
Kant. His last period, from 1886 until his death in 
1903, was devoted to the restatement of his earlier doc- 
trines, to the philosophy of history, and to the further 
development of his thought in the direction of a “per- 
sonalistic”’ metaphysics.! 


‘The second edition of the Essais de Critique générale embraced a 
Treatise of General Logic (Traité de Logique générale, 3 vols.), a Treatise 
of Rational Psychology (Traité de Psychologie rationelle, 3 vols.), and The 
Principles of Nature (Les Principes de la Nature, 2 vols.). Among his 
other works the following are the most important: Science de la Morale, 
2 vols., 1869; Hsquisse d’une Classification systématique des Doctrines 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 115 


That which sets Renouvier’s philosophy apart from 
the spiritualistic metaphysics of his time, and relates 
him both to positivism and to idealism—both to Hume 
and to Kant, is his “phenomenism.”’ Philosophy, like 
science, must eschew substances and begin with the 
appearances themselves. All that we immediately know 
(connaitre) is the particular phenomenon—the ‘‘repre- 
sentation.”” This must not be construed at the outset 
as either inside or outside of ourselves, since it is prior 
to any such division of the world, and provides the 
datum in terms of which alone such a division can be 
justified. The representation does, however, possess a 
double character. It is both a “representing” and a 
“represented” (representatif and representé). These are 
the two inseparable aspects of the least unit of experi- 
ence: it is an experience of something; and it is some- 
thing experienced. Realism makes the mistake of 
supposing that objects can be divorced from the repre- 
sentation of them; idealism makes the mistake of sup- 
posing that there can be representation with nothing to 
represent.! These errors can be escaped only by taking 
experience, thus doubly qualified, to be self-sufficient 
and to constitute the very stuff of reality. The notion 
of a thing-in-itself or substance of things, divorced from 
this positive content, is utterly meaningless and vain. 
The true philosophy will be a “critique”’ of knowledge, 
which takes experience in the above sense as the sole 


philosophiques, 2 vols., 1885-1886; Philosophie analytique de l’ Histoire, 
4 vols., 1896-1897; La Nouvelle Monadologie, 1899; Les Dilemmes de la 
Métaphysique pure, 1901; Le Personnalisme, 1903; and numerous articles 
in the reviews which he founded, the Année philosophique and the Cri- 
tique philosophique. 

1 Les Princtpes de la Nature, edition of 1912, pp. 8-17 


116 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


realm of fact, discovers the principles or categories 
which it involves, and by employing it as a norm, 
judges the legitimacy of the beliefs by which it is round- 
ed into a metaphysics and philosophy of life. 

Kant’s error lay in his failure to construe the realm 
of experience in its own terms. He converted its two 
aspects into two realms lying outside it: the transcenden- 
tal subject within and the transcendent object beyond. 
The effect is to make the knowable unreal and the real 
unknowable. It is true that provision must be made 
for a permanence and order of things (as distinguished 
from the individual’s passing states), but this is to be 
found in the representations themselves. For represen- 
tations have their own laws, or mutual relations of func-' 
tional dependence. Over and above the particular laws 
or functions which the sciences discover, there are cer- 
tain general laws which all representations obey, or 
which appertain to them generally as representations. 
These constitute the categories, of which Renouvier 
enumerated nine: relation, number, extent, duration, 
quality, becoming, causality, finality, and personality.’ 
Of these the category of relation is the most abstract 
and universal, for to assert anything of a representation 
is to predicate a relation of it. This category is also the 
most objective, belonging to the representation as rep- 
resented, rather than as representing. As we pass on 
there is a progression toward concreteness and subjec- 
tivity, the category of personality reflecting the fact 
that all representations are conscious; so that even 
when they are conceived by any consciousness as inde- 

1Summarized in Logique générale, edition of 1912, vol. I, pp. 117-123. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 1 hy 


pendent of itself, or as its “represented” rather than its 
“representing,” they have to be conceived at the same 
time as representing something to themselves, or as hav- 
ing a personality of their own. 

None of these categories, nor all of them together, 
permit of a total synthesis of the world! ‘They suffice 
for the limited purposes of science, but they carry us 
on from next to next, and never yield an absolute or 
whole. To pass beyond this relativity and indefinite- 
ness of science we have to employ two deeper principles, 
the negative principle of contradiction and the positive 
principle of belief. Representations and their own im- 
manent laws and categories give us knowledge of reality 
as far as they go, but they leave open the great issues 
or dilemmas of metaphysics, morality, and religion. Is 
the world infinite or finite? Is man free or determined? 
Is there or is there not a supreme moral order? The 
facts themselves yield no answer to these questions; 
and there is no escape from doubt unless we can find 
it by reflecting upon thought itself. 

The principle of contradiction has to be accepted un- 
less thought is to destroy itself. It proves a decisive 
consideration only in its application to the category 
of number. As distinct and multiple, representations 
can be counted; if they can be counted, then there is a 
number which corresponds to every multiplicity. But 
there is no infinite number. To avoid contradiction we 
must therefore suppose the world to be of finite extent 
in time and space; and to be composed of a finite num- 
ber of indivisible units or monads. Kant’s antinomies 

1QOp. cit., vol. II, pp. 199-351. 


118 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


are to be solved by accepting the thesis (finitude) and 
rejecting the antithesis (infinity) as contradictory.! 
God, if there be a God, must also be finite. Since there 
are first beginnings and discontinuities in the causal 
series, a place is made for freedom; not as Kant would 
have it, in some ‘“‘noumenal”’ world, but in the world 
of fact and experience. 

The metaphysical consequences of the principle of 
contradiction are largely negative and permissive. Be- 
lief is something more positive and more fundamental. 
For in order to apply even the principle of contradic- 
tion it is necessary first to believe or accept it. The 
same holds of the positive knowledge of science. This 
has a relatively high degree of certitude, and is univer- 
sally accepted. But it has to be accepted, none the less, 
before it constitutes knowledge; and acceptance is an 
act of will. The truth does not force itself on us. Cer- 
tainty is subjective; it means that we evaluate evidence, 
cease to think further, and come to a decision. Thus 
the ground is shifted from the general considerations of 
logic and experience to an analysis of man, with special 
reference to the relation of cognition and will.? 

Will is not a force operating ab extra on representa- 
tions, but consists in the character which representa- 
tions themselves have of maintaining themselves in 
consciousness. That they should derive this power 
from within themselves is entirely conceivable, once it 
is admitted that there are absolute beginnings in na- 
ture. When so construed as the tendency of a repre- 


1 Logique générale, edition of 1912, pp. 214-221. 
2 Cf. the Psychologie rationelle, passim. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 119 


sentation to maintain itself, and when in exclusive pos- 
session of consciousness to be followed by the appro- 
priate movements, the will does not differ essentially 
from belief, which is committal to a representation, or 
affirmation of it, as distinguished from doubt or the 
prolongation of reflection. 

The distinction between truth and error would mean 
nothing unless it were supposed that the will could 
choose freely in accordance with the evidence. If truth 
consisted in believing what one could not help believ- 
ing, then necessary error would be truth. The love of 
truth implies the search for evidence, as distinguished 
from hasty and careless belief. But this implies a free- 
dom to believe when one wills, or when one ought. 
Freedom itself cannot be proved beyond doubt, but 
has to be freely believed. Freedom is thus a postulate 
of knowledge, but it is also, as Kant had contended, a 
postulate of morality. Indeed, to conceive knowledge 
as belief, freely adopted by the will, is to recognize that 
knowledge and morality are indivisible. From this po- 
sition the transition is easily made to a doctrine of im- 
mortality and of God, justified on moral grounds. 

Although Renouvier thus traces belief to will, he does 
not in the least suppose it to be a matter of caprice. 
Justifiable belief is that which satisfies the demands of 
the total personality.1 These demands qualify one an- 
other: will is as much bound to satisfy the intellect, as 
intellect to satisfy will. There is a coherent demand 
which constitutes the ultimate standard of “reasonable- 
ness.” And man is entitled to demand that the uni- 

1Cf. Esquisse d’une Classification, etc., vol. II, ch. 8 and passim. 


120 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


verse shall satisfy hzs demands only in so far as he on 
his side accepts the demands of the universe, as re- 
vealed in his moral nature. There is a sort of funda- 
mental compact between man and the universe, accord- 
ing to which the universe engages itself to correspond 
with the requirements of righteousness.! 

Renouvier’s philosophy represents the attempt to 
construct a world out of phenomena and their laws. 
The phenomenon, the given fact of experience, is quali- 
fied to exist, as it is. It is true that there are ultimate 
metaphysical questions which can be answered only in 
terms of unverifiable beliefs, and which take us beyond 
the limits of actual phenomena, but this is not because 
there is anything inherently unreal in the phenomenon 
as such. Instead of being, as the term “phenomenon” 
suggests, the mere appearance of something to the mind, 
it takes up these two modes of reference into itself as 
its own aspects. Thus Renouvier may be said to have 
converted criticism into a metaphysics, or to have con- 
verted appearance into reality by removing its dis- 
paraging implications. This view is to be contrasted 
with agnosticism, which conceives reality to lie inac- 
cessibly behind phenomena; with dogmatism or eclecti- 
cism, which supposes that this reality beyond phenom- 
ena can be brought into view by the peculiar rays of 
the intellect; and with intuitionism, which supposes 
that it may be interpreted by analogy in terms of the 
subject’s direct acquaintance with himself as a free, 


1 The most important of the followers of Renouvier (excepting James, 
§ 24) was Octave HamELIN (1856-1907; Essais sur les Eléments princi- 
paux de la Représentation, 1907), who adopted a position close to that 
of Hegel. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 121 


voluntary activity. There is a fourth alternative to 
Renouvier’s phenomenism, which in German thought 
appeared in the Hegelian interpretation of Kant, and 
in French thought in the philosophy of Lachelier. Ac- 
cording to this view phenomena are construed not as 
the appearance of something to something, but as 
products of thought. The metaphysical reality is then 
creative thought, together with the inherent principles 
which govern its activity. 


JULES LACHELIER (1832-1918), like Ravaisson, has 
an importance in French philosophy out of proportion 
to the extent of his written works. Of these there are 
only two of importance, the doctoral dissertation on 
The Foundation of Induction! and the article on Psychol- 
ogy and Metaphysics. With the conciseness and rigor of 
thought which characterized his writings were united 
remarkable personal qualities, through which he exert- _ 
ed a powerful influence both on his students at the 
Ecole Supérieure, where he taught from 1864 to 1875, 
and on his colleagues and friends during the years of 
his service as Inspecteur de |’Académie de Paris and 
Inspecteur Général de I’Instruction Publique, and dur- 
ing the later years of his retirement. 

Lachelier diverged from the prevailing French spiri- 
tualism both in demanding rigorous proofs in place of 
intuition and analogy, and in construing spirit in terms 
of thought rather than of will. These two points are 


1 Du Fondament de UV Induction, 1871. This, together with the Psy- 
chologie et Métaphysique (which originally appeared in 1885, in the Revue 
de Métaphysique et de Morale), and (in later editions) the Notes sur le 
Pari de Pascal, appeared in a single volume in 1896. 


122 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


closely connected, since the alleged datum of inner in- 
tuition is will, while spirit, argued as a necessity, assumes 
the form of thought. Lachelier’s point of departure was 
the Kantian view (which Lachelier accepted as against 
Hume) that the empirical world of science derives its 
organization from the mind, and the universality of its 
laws from the fact that, being the product of the mind, 
it cannot fail to agree with the mind’s constitution. 
As with Kant, the categories are essentially modes of 
synthesis by which thought constructs its world. La- 
chelier went beyond Kant, however, in affirming that 
the world of organized experience, instead of represent- 
ing an adjustment of thought to externally given data, 
is through and through the product of thought; deter- 
mined wholly by the inner requirements of thought, 
and revealing thought as the only substantive reality. 

Lachelier’s persistent effort to deduce the world from 
thought is divisible into three main arguments: first, 
the world may be shown to be congruent with thought; 
second, the world can be explained only by supposing 
it to be produced by thought; third, thought does pro- 
duce the world through a creative activity whose modus 
operand: can be demonstrated. 

Nature as a mechanical system, where all is in move- 
ment under necessary law, satisfies the intellectual de- 
mand for unity. Mechanism, in itself, however, does 
not imply that anything shall actually happen or exist, 
only that A shall occur if B occurs. There is an aspect 
of will allied to the pune intellectual aspect of thought, 
and this requires a concrete world of things and events. 
In order to reconcile this reality with the requirements 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 123 


of unity it is necessary to introduce the category of 
finality, for realities determine one another not me- 
chanically but as means to ends or as parts of one 
whole. Mechanism is thus degraded to an abstract and 
symbolic representation of the deeper and more con- 
_ crete principle of finality. 

The world thus constituted does actually satisfy the 
demands of thought, or is thinkable. But how do we 
know that this is not an effect of reality upon thought, 
or a mere happy accident? Thought is itself real 
(rather than merely an echo or reflection of reality) 
only provided it creates its world, and does not merely 
discover and analyze it. Addressing himself to this 
question, in his Psychology and Metaphysics, Lachelier 
here attacked that traditional French psychology which 
would reduce the psychical to the physiological and 
physical. He argued that continuous physical extension, 
for example, is explicable only in terms of an act of per- 
ception which first ‘‘posits”’ a whole and then explores its 
interior; and that the externality of the physical world is 
explicable only in terms of the antithesis between the 
sense quality, on the one hand, and feeling or motor re- 
action on the other. But, most important of all, phys- 
ical and psychical facts alike are freed from relativity and 
given objectivity only by belonging to asystem of truths, 
which are judged and predicted by thought. If the 
world is thus explicable only by thought, then the exis- 
tence of the world proves the existence of thought. 

But Lachelier was not content to base the existence 
of thought on anything so dubious as the existent world: 
he attempted by a bold use of the dialectical method 


124 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


to establish the reality of thought independently, and 
to evolve the existent world out of it... Thought be- 
gins with the idea of bezng, a truth which proves itself, 
since to doubt it is to affirm that it zs true that it either 
is or is not. But thought is not content with this con- 
dition of mere abstract being. In order to think itself 
as a something which has being, as an attribute, it in- 
vokes sensibility, which gives a material content to 
space and time. This step is not deducible from ab- 
stract being, but is an act of will, in which thought 
shows itself to be something more than pure intellect. 
The last and highest stage is that of self-conscious re- 
flection, in which thought distinguishes itself as pure 
act or freedom from objects projected outside itself. 
This may be expressed by saying that thought ap- 
pears on three levels. First, the idea of abstract being 
or truth, because of its peculiarly recurrent character, 
takes on the symbolic or external forms of time and 
linear space conceived as series of homogeneous units, 
and of mechanical causality conceived as abstract or 
hypothetical possibility in time and space. Second, the 
thought of something in particular, not being deduci- 
ble from abstract being, involves an act of positing or 
will, and is externalized in the visible two-dimensional 
field of space, with a content provided by sensation, 
and determined by final causality. Third, the thought 
of itself as the original act and source externalizes itself 
in the third and invisible dimension of nature, in spa- 
tial depth, in the distinction between the near and 
remote and in the sphere of action. Thus thought is, 
1 Psychologie et Métaphysique, edition of 1924, pp. 158 ff. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 125 


first, intellectual and abstract and mechanical; second, 
desiderative, pictorial, concrete, and teleological; third, 
active and real. The last word is liberty, but it is the 
liberty of thought to think, and in thinking to express 
its own nature and create a world. 

These three levels of thought also signify to Lachelier 
the progression from science to art, and from art to 
religion. The mechanical system of science is complete 
in its own terms, and permits of no exceptions. But 
thought can rise to a higher view, in which the world 
assumes the form of realized and harmonious ends. 
Finally, in morality thought achieves the higher level 
of freedom. But since freedom attaches to thought, and 
since thought is universal, morality passes over into re- 
ligion, in which the individual recognizes his dependence 
on the universal thought, or God. Being a disillusioned 
republican, Lachelier justified political absolutism as the 
reign of the impersonal ideal or will of God; while as a 
Catholic he found in humility and faith a way of rising 
above the intellectual formulas of philosophy to an im- 
mediate sense of the concrete reality of the divine life.! 


1 Contemporary French idealism tends toward a critical examination 
of the categories of science, after the manner of neo-Kantianism, but 
with explicit reference to recent developments in mathematics and phys- 
ics. Lion Brunscuvica contends that the categories or principles of 
thinking mind cannot be deduced, but must be traced through their 
actual operation in the history of science. The nature of reason is re- 
vealed only in its application to the facts of experience. Cf. his Etapes 
de la Philosophie mathématique, 1912; and L’Expérience humaine et la 
Causalité physique, 1922. 

£. Meyerson, who is less closely identified with this philosophical 
tradition, finds in science a similar duality between the unity and iden- 
tity which are sought by reason and the irreducible novelty, movement, 
and temporality of existence. Cf. his Identité et Réalité, 1908, and La 
Déduction relativiste, 1925. 


126 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


§17. Idealism in England. Green. Bradley. Bosanquet 


In England it was idealism rather than spiritualism 
which was the champion of the moral and religious tra- 
dition against the naturalistic tendencies of the middle 
of the last century. The Kantian and post-Kantian 
doctrines, first unqualifiedly adopted by Stirling,! found 
their most influential exponent among English philoso- 
phers in THomas Hitt Green. He was born in 1836, 
and his career was identified with Oxford University, 
where he was first an undergraduate, afterward a fel- 
low and tutor of Balliol College, and finally, from 1878 
until his death in 1882, professor of moral philosophy. 
His most important works were originally delivered in 
the form of lectures, and the power exerted by his teach- 
ing was as far-reaching as that exerted by his writings. 
He was the accepted leader of the reaction against the 
cult of Buckle, Darwin, and Spencer; but in combating 
naturalism he went back to its roots in empiricism, and 
thus repudiated the whole British philosophical tradi- 
tion, the essential errors of which he believed to be 
most perfectly exemplified in the work of Hume. In- 
deed, the only expression of his views which was pub- 
lished during his life consisted in Introductions append- 
ed to an edition of Hume’s T’reatises.2, But Green was 
not less interested in combating the utilitarian moral 
philosophy, which he believed to be as untenable as the 


*§ 4. 

2A Treatise on Human Nature, by David Hume, edited by T. H. 
Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols., 1874. The Prolegomena to Ethics ap- 
peared in 1883, and the Works, 3 vols. (including his important Princi- 
ples of Political Obligation and miscellaneous historical writings), in the 
years 1885-1888. , 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 127 


empiricism in which it was rooted; and the most sys- 
tematic and important of his works, in which he de- 
rived the principle of self-realization from an idealistic 
theory of knowledge, bears the title of Prolegomena to 
Ethics. 

Green took as his point of departure “that analysis 
of the conditions of knowledge which forms the basis 
of all Critical Philosophy, whether called by the name 
of Kant or no.” The beginning of knowledge is “the 
experience of connected matters of fact.’”? Empiricism 
(as exemplified by Hume) makes the mistake of sup- 
posing that the “connection”’ can itself be one of the 
matters of fact,) whereas it has to be supplied by 
thought. The Kantian forms and categories become 
for Green the connective tissue of the known world. 
Sensation or “feeling’’ supplies the terms, but thought 
alone can supply the relations. There cannot even be 
a succession of feelings unless there subsists between 
them a relation which is not a feeling, and which is not 
itself in the line of succession. Things do not unite 
themselves into a relation, but require the intervention 
ab extra of some ‘‘combining agency.”’ Since nothing 
can enter into knowledge that is unrelated to conscious- 
ness, this combining agency must be an activity of con- 
sciousness. ‘With such a combining agency we are 
familiar as our intelligence,” our “thinking or self-dis- 
tinguishing consciousness.” ? The unity of nature is 
explicable only as an expression of the unity of the self. 

But Green would not have us suppose that this ex- 
planation of nature in terms of our “combining intelli- 


1 Prolegomena, § 8. 2 Tbid., §§ 28, 10, 29, 46. 


128 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


gence” is, as Kant thought, prejudicial to its reality. 
This would be so, if, in the first place, there were an- 
other reality which lay beyond this combining intelli- 
gence, whether of things-in-themselves, or of bare sensa- 
tions produced by things-in-themselves. Sensations are 
nothing, according to Green, except in so far as they are 
brought into systematic relations, and their dependence 
on things-in-themselves could mean nothing except in 
terms of such relations extended illegitimately beyond 
experience. To know anything, whether sensations or 
things-in-themselves, is to relate; and to relate is to 
confer on the terms related whatever meaning, reality, 
and “‘objectivity’”’ they possess. 

The product of a relating consciousness would be un- 
real, in the second place, if it were the work of the pri- 
vate, individual mind, with its own particular and lim- 
ited field of experience—with its place in nature and its 
moment in history. We must suppose, therefore, that 
the combining intelligence which creates the real sys- 
tem of nature, as distinguished from that of our private 
and limited selves, is an “eternal intelligence,’ which 
determines nature in advance of our individual human 
acquaintance with it, and “partially and gradually re- 
produces itself in us.”?! This divine mind, which con- 
stitutes the universal system of reality, is not itself 
subject to any of the relational categories which it pro- 
duces; and if we speak of it as a “cause,’’ we must un- 
derstand this term in the unique sense of that free and 
spontaneous activity with which we are acquainted in 
our own thought.? 


1 Prolegomena, §§ 36 ff. 2 Tbid., § 78. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 129 


Because man can know, or participate in that ‘“com- 
bining intelligence” which constitutes nature, he can- 
not be himself merely a part of nature. But man tran- 
scends nature not only cognitively in respect of his 
intelligence, but also morally in respect of his will. To 
understand will it is first necessary to understand de- 
sire, which is distinguished from mere instinct through 
being self-conscious; and from intellect, in that while 
the latter gives ideality to an apparently alien material, 
desire gives material content or reality to what is at 
first only an ideal. Will is distinguishable from mere 
desire not as the strongest desire, but as that desire with 
which the agent zdentifies himself. Thus all voluntary 
action is directed to the end of realizing a certain idea 
of one’s self. The object of desire or will is zpso facto 
good, in the generic sense; but it is morally good only 
when it is the object of a moral will.’ 

What, then, is this moral will which is in each one 
of us? The answer is to be found again in the implica- 
tion of an eternal mind, which “reproduces”’ itself in 
man as that aspiration to perfection or to the absolutely 
best, which is characteristic of our moral consciousness.‘ 
The moral will is the willing by man of God’s will. 

But how does man know the divine will? For an- 
swer, Green had to employ the assumption that history 
and organized society are its embodiments. The state, 
which is an expression of will rather than of force, owes 
its authority to its being the expression of a “collective 
will.” > Thus Green, although he did not adopt the dia- 


1 Prolegomena, §§$ 130-133. %Jbid., §14 3 Jiid., § 171. 
‘ Tbid., §§ 173, 174. ’ Principles ) Moral Obligation, passim. 


130 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


lectical method of Hegel, and was both nationally and 
temperamentally inclined to individualism, found him- 
self forced by the exigencies of his philosophical prem- 
ises toward the universalism and authoritarianism 
which had been the characteristic developments of the 
classic idealism in Germany. 


FRANCIS HERBERT BRADLEY (1846-1924), like Green, 
who was his teacher, waged war on contemporary nat- 
uralism, and on the British empirical and utilitarian 
tradition. Like Green, he drew his inspiration from 
Kantian sources, and in particular from Hegel. Other- 
wise there is a marked contrast between these leaders 
of the British idealistic movement. Although resident 
at Oxford, Bradley was prevented by ill-health from as- 
suming the duties of an academic career, and spent the 
greater part of his life in seclusion, as a research fellow 
of Merton College. Profiting by his leisure and despite 
his ill-health, Bradley, unlike Green, developed his 
views systematically, ‘and defended them against at- 
tack. His first book, entitled Ethical Studies (1876), 
was both a critique of hedonism, and a development of 
the thesis that the good lies in the realization of a har- 
monious and unified self in organic relations with so- 
ciety. In The Principles of Logic (1883)? he developed 
two important theses. As against the psychological 


1A closer approach to the position of Hegel is to be found in the 
Cairds. Epwarp Catrp (1835-1908) is notable for his personal influence 
as Master of Balliol College, and for his Critical Account of the Philosophy 
of Kant (1877); Jon Catrp (1820-1898), for his Introduction to the 
Philosophy of Religion (1880). 

2 Two vols., second edition published in 1914. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 131 


method he asserted that the subject of judgment is not 
an idea, but is reality, which is qualified by the total ideal 
content of the judgment. Thus judgment takes us at 
once beyond the judging mind, and so beyond the juris- 
diction of psychology. As against empiricism, he assert- 
ed that the act of judgment, instead of being a repro- 
duction of data given in sense-perception, is grounded 
in ulterior judgments as part of a coherent and rational 
system of thought. 

The Appearance and Reality, which was published in 
1891,1 revealed most clearly the qualities of Bradley’s 
mind. An acute dialectician, and committed to the the- 
sis that the real is the rational, he here turned the in- 
tellect against itself and held the traditional idealistic 
categories—especially that category of relation which 
Green had accepted as fundamental—to be contradic- 
tory and untenable. Although more intellectualistic 
than Green in his method, he found his ultimate solu- 
tion in immediacy and feeling. In the controversy 
stimulated by this famous work, Bradley took an active 
part through a series of articles, many of which were 
brought together in the last of his books, Truth and 
Reality, which was published in 1914. 

The root of Bradley’s metaphysics and theory of 
knowledge lies in the distinction already alluded to, be- 
tween reality as the subject of judgment, and the ideal 
content which judgment ascribes to it; or the dis- 
tinction between the “that” and the “what.”’ Reality 
is somehow indicated in experience as that which we 
think about; but reality is also what we think about it. 

1 Second enlarged edition, 1897. 


132 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST ' 


That we should be compelled to think about it, and 
hold it to be what we think, proves that it is not real 
as it is given. Thought is the effort to supplement the 
evident inadequacy of immediate experience, by intro- 
ducing distinctions and qualifications both within and 
without. But thought finds it impossible to complete 
this task. Its affirmations always point beyond them- 
selves, so that as soon as they are made they have to 
be denied. There is no escape from the difficulty. We 
can neither accept experience without thinking it, nor 
can we think it successfully; thought is both necessary 
and self-contradictory. This characteristic pervades 
all of the categories, but is seen most clearly in the fun- 
damental categories of substantive, adjective, quality, 
and relation. 

We employ the categories of substantive and adjective 
when we say, of any given thing M, that Misa. But 
either M and a are the same, in which case we have 
said nothing; or they are different, in which case we 
have contradicted ourselves in saying that M is a. If, 
on the other hand, we mean that M is a, but not merely 
a, because of being also b, then we have to ask how M 
can be both a and’b if a and 6 are different. Either we 
again contradict ourselves, or we have destroyed the 
unity of M, and put two things, a and 8, in its place. 
We may seek to evade these contradictions by substi- 
tuting for the inherence of the adjectives a and b, in 
the substantive M, a direct relation between the quali- 
ties a and b, as when the empiricist reduces a thing to 
the sum of its properties. But we now encounter fresh 
difficulties, in the category of relation. Either we have 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 133 


to treat the relation to b as an adjective of a and the 
relation to a as an adjective of b—in which case the old 
difficulties reappear, and are aggravated by the suppo- 
sition that a and b can be reciprocally substantive and 
adjective—or we have to treat the relation itself (r) as 
a third being, which merely increases the multiplicity 
without achieving any unity. For if our only unifying 
principle is relation, we have now to relate r to a and to 
6 by new relations 7! and r?, and so on ad infinitum. 

By a similar method Bradley disposes of the tradi- 
tional conceptions of primary and secondary qualities, 
space and time, motion and change, causation, activity, 
self, and things-in-themselves, and thus by implication 
refutes materialism, phenomenalism, agnosticism, and 
monadic spiritualism. 

But although this critique discredits most of the cate- 
gories of common-sense and of philosophy, and compels 
us to relegate them to “appearance” as distinguished 
from reality, the results are by no means wholly nega- 
tive. In the first place, we have discovered a, criterion. 
“Ultimate reality is such that it does not contradict it- 
self’’;? it must be self-consistent. Secondly, it must 
contain the appearances, for there is no other disposition 
that can be made of these. Combining these two affir- 
mations we conclude that in reality appearance must be 
“concordant and other than it seems.” Thirdly, reality 
must be one, for whether we perceive them together or 
think them together, different reals must qualify one 


1 Appearance and Reality, chs. II, III. Cf. also Truth and Reality, 
ch. VIII. 
2 Appearance and Reality, edition of 1908, p. 136. 


134 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


another; and in accordance with the fundamental cri- 
terion they must be supposed to qualify one another as 
parts of a harmonious whole.! Fourthly, reality is sen- 
tient experience. ‘There is no being or fact outside of 
. that which is commonly called psychical existence.’’ ? 
It follows from all of these conclusions that reality is 
an individual experience in which all appearances are 
harmoniously resolved. This reality is henceforth re- 
ferred to as the Absolute. 

The Absolute is, however, not a mere construction. 
We cannot, it is true, enter into the Absolute’s experi- 
ence, but its ‘main features” are within our own. 
‘“‘Complex wholes are felt as single experiences.” Mere 
feeling or “immediate presentation”’ is the experience 
of a whole containing diversity “not parted by rela- 
tions’’; it fails to satisfy us only because of its incom- 
pleteness.2 We never see reality, so to speak, “but 
through a hole.” * We attempt to complete it “by re- 
lational addition from without and by relational dis- 
tinction from within.” On this level our experience is 
self-contradictory. But we can form the idea of a 
“positive non-relational non-objective whole of feel- 
ing,” > that shall be above this level rather than below 
it—‘‘a whole become immediate at a higher stage with- 
out losing any richness,” in which the diversity brought 


1 Appearance and Reality, edition of 1908, pp. 140-143. 

2 Tbid., p. 144. Cf. Truth and Reality, p. 315. This does not mean, 
Bradley points out, that reality is subjective, for the conception of 
sentient experience is prior to the distinction between subject and ob- 
ject. 

3 Appearance and Reality., edition of 1908, pp. 159, 521. 

4 Principles of Logic, Book I, ch. IT, § 29. 

5 Truth and Reality, pp. 188-189. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 135 


to light on the relational level shall be “merged” but 
preserved.! 

Furthermore, this process of advancing to higher im- 
mediacies through intermediate stages of discursive 
thought is known to us in our esthetic, cognitive, and 
moral experiences. From the standpoint of the higher 
levels the lower levels are seen to be partial ‘‘appear- 
ances” or “degrees’’ of the same reality. Thus “truth 
and life, beauty and goodness” are all revelations of an 
Absolute which must be all that they are, and yet pass 
beyond the defects which mar even these reconciling 
harmonies. No appearances fall outside the Absolute, 
and all must, in the Absolute, be in some measure other 
than they appear, in order that their contradictions 
may be overcome; but while some will undergo a “rear- 
rangement”’ so radical as to be unrecognizable, others, 
which we commonly call “higher,” afford us genuine 
premonitions of the Absolute perfection. 


After Green and Bradley the most important mem- 
ber of the British idealistic school was BeRNARD Bosan- 
quEeT.? Like Bradley and his idealistic predecessors, 
Bosanquet identifies the existent world with the con- 


1 Appearance and Reality, edition of 1908, pp. 160, 241-242. 

21848-1923. Author of Logic, 1888; History of Aisthetic, 1892; Philo- 
sophical Theory of the State, 1899; The Principle of Individuality and 
Value, 1912; The Value and Destiny of the Individual, 1913; and numer- 
ous other works. Bosanquet’s successor in this line of thought is R. F. A. 
Hoernlé (1880- ; Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics, 1920; Matter, 
Life, Mind and God, 1922). Other British idealists of the same idealistic 
tradition are J. S. Mackenzie (1860- ; Outlines of Metaphysics, 1902; 
Elements of Constructive Philosophy, 1917), J. H. Muirhead (1855- : 
Elements of Ethics, 1892; Social Purpose, 1918), and A. E. Taylor 
(1869- ; Elements of Metaphysics, 1903). 


ed 


136 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


tent of rationalized experience. He differed from Brad- 
ley in that he emphasized the success of thought (in 
reconciling immediacy and logic) rather than its fail- 
ures. His leading idea was the concrete universal, re- 
vealed in the higher synthetic experiences, and in the 
“collective will,” ! the latter furnishing the basis for his 
political and social teachings. His philosophy, which is 
rich in incidental insight, may be taken as proclaiming 
the idea of wholeness, as furnishing the key to logic, 
metaphysics, ethics, art, and religion. Truth lies in 
systematic coherence; reality in the all-embracing in- 
dividual whole, of which the parts possess degrees of 
reality in proportion as they mirror the whole; moral 
and political action should be governed by the will of 
the whole; and it is the whole, as revealed in its parts, 
which is the proper object both of esthetic contempla- 
tion and of religious reverence. 


§ 18. Idealism in America. Royce. Howison. Bowne 


The idealism of Jostan Royce differed profoundly 
from that of Green and Bradley. Born in California, 
when that State was still a remote frontier community; 
influenced in his early youth by the evolutionary teach- 
ings of Le Conte,? and by his studies of Mill and Spen- 
cer; afterward intimately associated with James,’ his 
thought always retained a naturalistic and empirical 
flavor. As an American he was predisposed to individ- 
ualism, and sought earnestly to reconcile this motive 
with the absolutistic trend of his philosophy. He ac- 
quired a strong interest in symbolic logic and the philos- 

1 Cf. Green, aha ye: 2§ 5. 3 § 25. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 137 


ophy of mathematics, and employed them in his con- 
ception of the infinite and in his studies of methodology. 
Finally, he was led through his early religious training 
and his social interests to attempt a philosophical inter- 
pretation of Christianity. Nevertheless the influences 
which most profoundly moulded his thought were those 
received in Germany from his studies of Lotze, Scho- 
penhauer, Kant, and Schelling. Romanticism made a 
strong appeal to him because of his interest in literature 
and music, and it is this influence which is most clearly 
reflected in his first book, The Religious Aspect of Philos- 
ophy, published in 1885. His most important work was 
The World and the Individual (1900-1901), which re- 
‘veals a profound study of Hegel, of Indian philosophy, 
and of scholasticism.! He taught philosophy at Har- 
-vard University from 1882 until his death in 1916. 

Whereas for Bradley immediate experience proves 
unsatisfactory and evokes thought to piece it out, for 
Royce it is thought which seeks to complete itself in 
immediate experience. With Bradley reality is a datum, 
given inadequately in finite experience and adequately 
in the Absolute, with conceptual thinking as a, transi- 
tion from the one level to the other. With Royce, on 
the other hand, reality is essentially the object of 
thought; so that whereas for Bradley thinking may be 
regarded as infected with contradiction, because it is 
transcended in reality, for Royce it must be acquitted 
of the charge and its good name restored. 


1 The more important of his other writings were: The Spirit of Modern 
Philosophy, 1892; The Conception of God (in collaboration with Le Conte, 
Howison, and S. E. Mezes), 1897; The Philosophy of Loyalty, 1908; The 
Problem of Christiantty (2 vols.), 1913. 


1388 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


Starting (after the manner of British empiricism) 
with ‘‘finite ideas,’ Royce finds that they possess an 
“internal” and an ‘external’? meaning! Over and 
above its content, the judging thought carries a refer- 
ence beyond itself to its object. This object cannot be 
regarded as an “independent real,” for then it could 
never be known; nor as a mystical immediacy which 
“quenches” thought, for then it would be unintelligi- 
ble; nor as a possibility of experience determined by 
valid ideas, for a mere possibility is nothing at all. Real- 
ism, mysticism, and “critical rationalism” being thus 
disposed of, idealism is introduced as the view which 
defines reality as the fulfilment of ideas, in which the 
purpose embodied in their internal meaning is realized 
in the experience of their external meaning. Only the 
idea itself can recognize its own object, as that which 
it intended, and thus testify authoritatively to its own 
fulfilment. The object can be “individual” only when 
the idea chooses it, claims it, and refuses otherwise to 
be satisfied.? Both the specificity of objective reference 
and the uniqueness of particular facts depend on thus 
construing ideas as having wills of their own. Thought 
is a conscious ‘‘life,’”’ in which ideas find satisfaction in 
their objects. ‘To be, in the final sense, means to be 
just such a, life, complete, present to experience, and 
conclusive of the search for perfection which every finite 
idea in its own measure undertakes when it seeks for 
any object.” 3 


1 World and the Individual, vol. I, Lect. VII. 
4 Conception of God, pp. 217-272. 
3 World and the Individual, vol. I, pp. 341-342. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 139 


The Absolute appears in Royce’s philosophy in 
response to two demands. In the first place, reality 
must fulfil all ideas. In order to escape the relativity 
and conflict of finite ideas, it is necessary to suppose 
that they are taken up into one self-consistent system 
of ideas, or one individual purpose and will, which finds 
its satisfaction in the total realm of existence. In the 
second place, there can be no facts that are not experi- 
enced; and the Absolute experience is thus invoked to 
provide for such facts as are implied in finite experience, 
but fall outside it. The very possibility of truth and 
error, which attaches to all finite ideas, compels us to 
assume that there is a more inclusive experience which 
comprehends both the purposes of finite ideas and 
also the facts in which these purposes are fulfilled or 
thwarted. 

Royce recognized that the conception of the Absolute 
involved a logical difficulty and he resolutely faced it. 
If the Absolute experiences all facts, then this is in 
turn a fact which the Absolute must experience, and so 
on ad infinitum. The Absolute is, therefore, both a 
unity and at the same time an endless series of self- 
representations. It must, in other words, be a com- 
pleted infinite. But in the light of modern mathematics 
this is no longer a self-contradiction. It is true that the 
infinite cannot be exhausted by enumeration, and has 
no last term, but it can be defined posztively as a system 
which is similar (in the sense of one to one correspon- 
dence) to a part of itself. The Absolute knows itself as 
infinite, or so defines itself as to provide at one stroke 

1 Religious Aspect of Philosophy, ch. XI. 


140 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


(totum simul) for a richness of content which, because 
known to be inexhaustible, it does not vainly seek to 
exhaust.} 

With this monistic metaphysics Royce sought ear- 
nestly to reconcile the distinctive peculiarities of human 
experience. He was not satisfied to declare them to be 
mere appearances, but sought to provide for them in 
reality. Thus time is not an unreality to be superseded 
by the eternal, but is a peculiar sequence which in the 
Absolute is grasped all at once, as human perception 
grasps a melody.? Evil is not transmuted into good, 
and therefore condoned, but remains as that which even 
in the Absolute has to be resisted and overcome.? Hu- 
man individuals are not swallowed up in the Absolute, 
but each is a unique part of the unique whole, contrib- 
uting through its own expression of the divine will 
something which is both indispensable to the whole 
and peculiar to itself.‘ 

Royce’s thought tended to a greater and greater em- 
phasis on the conception of society. In his theory of 
knowledge he came to define thought in terms of “in- 
terpretation,” rather than in terms of the meaning of 
ideas. The latter was a direct relation of idea and ob- 
ject; the former is a social relation, in which one mind’s 
idea becomes a sign of the object to a second mind.° 
His ethics centred in the principle of “loyalty,” or of 
the individual’s devotion to a “cause” greater than 


1 World and the Individual, vol. I, Supplementary Essay. 
2 Tbid., vol. II, Lect. III. 

3 Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 452, 465. 

4 Conception of God, pp. 272-275. 

& Problem of Christianity, vol. II, Lects. XIII, XTV. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 141 


himself. The ultimate moral principle is that of ‘“loy- 
alty to loyalty” in which the individual, while serving 
his own cause, respects and co-operates with the spirit 
of loyalty wherever he finds it. It was this spirit to 
which Royce looked for a solution of racial and inter- 
national problems through the idea of “The Great 
Community.” ? Finally, he found the essence of Chris- 
tianity to consist in a “community of the faithful,’ 
“hopefully and practically devoted to the cause of the 
still invisible, but perfectly real and divine Universal 
Community.” ? 


The tendency which was so marked in Royce’s phi- 
losophy, to emphasize the human individual and to con- 
ceive values in terms of society, found a bolder expres- 
sion in the “personal idealism” of GEorcE H. Howson 
(1825-1916), who as professor at the University of Cal- 
ifornia from 1884 until 1909 exerted a notable influence 
upon the cultural development of the Pacific Coast. In 
a public discussion with Royce and others, held at the 
University of California in 1895,3 Howison attacked 
Royce’s “ Monistic Idealism,” or conception of the Ab- 
solute, and defended a “ Pluralistic Idealism,” on the 
ground that an “Infinite Inclusive Self’? would not 
only swallow up and annihilate all human selves, but 
lose its own selfhood; since selfhood is essentially a 
moral consciousness, implying the recognition of other 
selves. 


1 Philosophy of Loyalty, and The Hope of the Great Commumity (1916). 

2 Problem of Christianity, vol. II, p. 425. 

* This discussion was published in 1897, under the title of The Con- 
ception of God (cf. p. 547, note 3). 


142 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


In a later book, entitled The Limits of Evolution,! 
Howison developed this thesis more systematically, 
against monism both of the naturalistic type, as exem- 
plified by Spencer and Haeckel, and of the idealistic 
type, as exemplified by the Hegelian school. Having 
refuted naturalism on Kantian grounds, Howison’s main 
purpose was to save Kantianism from destroying itself 
through the internal conflict between its cognitive and 
its practical principles. Nature is the product of the 
cognitive mind, and the systematic unity of nature sug- 
gests that it is the product of one absolute mind, of 
which the human mind is only a mode or vehicle. The 
practical or moral consciousness, on the other hand, 
implies that the human individual is one of a circle or 
kingdom of free, immortal, and autonomous persons. 
How reconcile these counter-claims of universality and 
personality? Only, thinks Howison, by construing cog- 
nition in terms of a “‘social logic,” in which objectivity 
and truth are held to consist in a “universal social rec- 
ognition.” ? Nature is the creation of our several per- 
sonal selves, but nature is one, because we are like- 
minded and guided by the same rational purpose. 

This unifying purpose finds its supreme expression in 
God. As a reality, God is one person among others. 
Only by recognizing persons other than himself who 
have rights, and toward whom he has duties, can God 
be a moral person at all. He does not include human 
individuals within himself, nor does he coerce them, 


1 The full title was The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays Illustrat- 
ing the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism, 1901; 2d and revised 
edition, 1904. 

3 Op. cit., edition of 1904, pp. xxxvi-xxxviii. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 143 


but he acts upon them by attraction (by “final” or 
“moral” causation), as the zdeal which they adopt of 
their own free will.t The realm of nature, or the world 
of sense, also falls outside of God, as being the product 
of the human mind. So God is not responsible for evil, 
but may be worshipped as the embodiment of perfec- 
tion. He is the “Supreme Instance” in the “eternal 
circle of Persons,” the first “‘citizen”’ in “the all-found- 
ing, all-governing Realm of Spirits.” ? 


“Personal” idealism manifests three characteristic 
tendencies. In the first place, it tends, through its de- 
sire to save the individual and his moral attributes, to 
emphasize the will and the practical consciousness, at 
the expense of the theoretical reason. Although Howi- 
son himself resisted this tendency, it resulted among 
British idealists in a movement toward voluntarism and 
pragmatism. In the second place, personal idealism 
tends to an emphasis on society as a means of saving 
itself from the relativistic and sceptical consequences of 
an unqualified individualism. Finally, personal ideal- 


1 Limits of Evolution, pp. 65, 328. 

8 Tbid., p. 355; Conception of God, p. 118. 

8 That is, toward the type of philosophy discussed below, Part IV. 
This transition in British thought is exemplified by the volume of 
essays entitled Personal Idealism, which appeared in 1902, and in which 
idealists, voluntarists, and pragmatists united on the common ground 
of pluralism. Exponents of the same “personalistic’” tendency, but 
standing nearer to the centre of idealism, are Thomas Davidson (1840- 
1900), in America; and in England, James Ward (1843-1925; Naturalism 
and Agnosticism, 1899; The Realm of Ends, 1911), J. M. E. McTaggart 
(1866-1925; Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 1901; Some Dogmas of Re- 
ligion, 1906; The Nature of Existence, 1921), and A. Seth Pringle-Patti- 
son (1856— ; Hegelianism and Personality, 1887; Man’s Place in the 
Cosmos, 1897; The Idea of God in the Light of Modern Philosophy, 1917). 


144 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


ism tends to emphasize the substantive reality of per- 
sons, as known immediately in self-consciousness, and 
thus moves toward a spiritualism of the Lotzean type. 
The most influential exponent in America of this last 
tendency was BorDEN PARKER Bowne.! This philoso- 
pher’s interests were primarily metaphysical and reli- 
gious. As for his teacher Lotze, so for Bowne, the real 
is that which can act and be acted upon, of which spirit 
is the only known case. The real meaning of the cate- 
gories is to be found not in their conceptual or formal 
role, as modes of connection among phenomena, but 
“through our living experience of intelligence itself.” 
In this “active self-experience”’ is to be found a revela- 
tion of causality, of substance, of unity-in-manyness, 
and of identity in change. The categories so construed 
in terms of the real mind which creates phenomena, 
may then be assigned to the reality beyond phe- 
nomena—a, step which all philosophers have virtually 
taken in acknowledging the reality of other selves. 
This doctrine Bowne called his “transcendental em- 
piricism.” 

The speculative reason recognizes its own limits, and 
beyond these “we have to fall back on belief based on 
the necessities or the intimations of practical life.” 2 
This principle of faith Bowne employed to justify the 
hopeful bias and the specific dogmas of religion, recog- 
nizing as did Lotze and Ritschl that these dogmas need 
to be variously expressed and perpetually restated, in 


11847-1910. His most important writings were Studies in Theism, 
1879; and Metaphysics, 1882 (2d edition, 1898). A brief popular sum- 
mary of his position was contained in Personalism, 1908. 

2 Metaphysics (1898), p. 427. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 145 


order that they may preserve their value in terms of 
the living religious experience. But the speculative rea- 
son lays the foundation of religion in a spiritualistic 
metaphysics, which defines “a world of persons with a 
Supreme Person at the head,” of which nature is the 
expression and means of communication, and which, 
despite their ultimate substantial and causal unity, 
nevertheless as persons preserve a ‘mutual otherness”’ 
and “relative independence.” ! 


$19. Critical Idealism in Germany. Cohen. Natorp 


The revival of Kant in Germany in the 1860’s was 
followed by a revival of those very post-Kantian ten- 
dencies against which the Kantian revival had itself 
protested. Although neo-Kantianism sprang from a de- 
sire to purge Kantianism of the alien elements intro- 
duced by Hegel, Fichte, and Romanticism, it was 
promptly followed by neo-Hegelianism, neo-Fichtean- 
ism, and neo-Romanticism. There appears, in other 
words, to be an inevitable and recurrent cycle through 
which the thought of Kant passes, inspired by the in- 


1 Metaphysics, part I, ch. II; Personalism, p. 277. Next after those 
mentioned in the text, the most prominent of American idealists at the 
opening of the century was James E. Creighton (1861-1924; Studies in 
Speculative Philosophy, 1925), for many years an influential teacher at 
Cornell University. The American idealist who follows Royce most 
closely is Mary W. Calkins (The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 1907; 
The Good Man and the Good, 1918). Another thinker whose position is 
close to that of Royce is W. E. Hocking, who argues that “nature is 
always present to experience as known by an Other” (The Meaning of 
God in Human Experience, 1912, p. 278). W. H. Sheldon (The Strife of 
Systems, 1918) proposes a dialectical reconciliation of idealism and real- 
ism which in its method and its ultimate concept (creativity) is more 
idealistic than realistic. 


146 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


tellectualistic Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason, the 
voluntaristic and moralistic Kant of the Critique of 
Practical Reason, and the esthetic and intuitionistic 
Kant of the Critique of Judgment. Reject the concep- 
tion of the thing-in-itself, as all later Kantians proceed 
promptly to do, and mind and its creations are left in 
possession of the field. There then arises a rivalry of 
emphasis among the several modes of the mind’s activ- 
ity, thought, will, and feeling. Each, after absorbing 
the other two, may claim to be the original and gener- 
ative principle of experience and reality. 

There was nevertheless a marked difference between 
the new post-Kantianism and the old. While the origi- 
nal followers of Kant rejected the thing-in-itself, they 
rejected it. as unknowable, rather than as a symbol of 
metaphysical reality. They found through thought or 
will or feeling a knowable thing-in-itself, and hence aban- 
doned the critical method for speculative metaphysics. 
In this they were followed as a rule by the British and 
American idealists whom they influenced. The new 
German post-Kantians, on the other hand, not only re- 
jected the thing-in-itself, but renounced the metaphysi- 
cal aspiration which it symbolized. They endeavored 
to remain faithful to the critical method, as opposed 
both to “dogmatic” metaphysics, and to that “psychol- 
ogism’’ which describes the phenomena of the mental 
life without recognizing their necessary epistemological 
implications. They conceived philosophy, in other 
words, to be the study of the presuppositions of the 
sciences. Hence it was not so much a question of the 
relative reality of thought, will, or feeling, as of the 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 147 


relative priority of the categories of physics, ethics, and 
esthetics. 


The so-called “ Marburg school” arose as an attempt 
to purify the Kantianism of Lange.' It derived its 
name from the fact that its members, including Lange, 
were professors at the University of Marburg. Its prin- 
cipal representatives were HermMaNN CoHEN (1842- 
1918) and his pupil and associate Paut Natorp (1854- 
1924).2 Their systems were symmetrical and closely 
similar, and followed the order of the Kantian Critiques, 
of which Cohen was a leading commentator.* In devel- 
oping his own thought Cohen began with a Logic of 
Pure Knowledge and added an Ethics of Pure Will and 
an Aisthetic of Pure Feeling. To the first of these cor- 
responds Natorp’s Logical Foundations of the Exact Sci- 
ences, while the latter’s ethical teachings are developed 
in his Social Pedagogy.6 Both writers also paid their 
respects to religion, and both recognized the need of 
some unifying conception by which natural science, eth- 
ics, and art should be united. Cohen found such a con- 
ception in a general “cultural consciousness” (Kultur- 

1§ 11. 

* The most eminent living representative of this school is Ernst Cas- 
SIRER (Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, 1910; English trans., Swb- 
stance and Function, 1923). Cassirer’s thought has departed far from 
its Kantian origins, and deals generally with the logic of science, with 
emphasis on its formal and relational structure, and with special refer- 
ence to recent developments in physics. 

3In his Kant’s Theorie der Erfahrung, 1871; Kant’s Begrtindung der 
Ethik, 1877; and Kant’s Begriindung der Aisthetik, 1899. 

4 Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 1902; Ethik des reinen Willens, 1904; 


Aisthethik des reinen Gefiihls, 1912. 
5 Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften, 1910; Sozial- 


padagogik, 1899. 


148 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


bewusstsein), while Natorp found it in that “subjectiv- 
ity” of consciousness which, being transcended in 
natural science, ethics, and art, has afterward to be 
restored and taken account of in a general or philo- 
sophical psychology.! 

Kant’s thing-in-itself being left out of the account, 
there was no longer for Cohen any occasion for retaining 
the distinction between the receptivity of intuition and 
the spontaneity of the understanding. Thought is no 
longer an organization of the given, but a purely cre- 
ative process. To be and to be thought (the act and the 
product) are one and the same thing.” Instead of nature 
as object (Gegenstand) there is only science and its task 
(Aufgabe). And science means for Cohen the exact sci- 
ence which derives its form from mathematics. Hence 
when he draws up his table of the categories, he places 
first those which constitute the laws of thought itself 
(origin, identity, contradiction); then the categories of 
pure mathematics (reality, multiplicity, allness); then 
those of applied mathematics (substance, law, concept) ; 
and finally those of “modality” (possibility, actuality, 
necessity). 

The most distinctive feature of Cohen’s doctrine of 
the categories is the fundamental place which he assigns 
to that of “origin” (Ursprung). This category signifies 
the power of thought to construct by a synthesis of un- 


1 Allgemeine Psychologie nach kritischer Methode, 1912. Natorp also 
published historical studies of Plato and of Pestalozzi (Plato’s Ideenlehre, 
1908; Der Idealismus Pestalozzi’s, 1919), which exercised a considerable 
influence on his own thought, especially his ethics. His Vorlesungen tiber 
praktische Philosophie was published posthumously in 1925. 

3 Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, p. 18. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 149 


decomposable elements. Such elements Cohen thought 
to be provided by the infinitesimal of calculus. The 
same idea appears among the categories of mathematics 
as the category of “‘reality.”” Mathematics is essentially 
quantitative or numerical, and assumes an element to 
be measured or counted. This element by which quan- 
tities can be generated, and which is not itself quanti- 
tative, but individual and ‘‘real,’’ is again the infinitesi- 
mal. 

As logic formulates the principles of ‘‘pure thought,” 
so ethics formulates the principles of “pure will.” As 
the pure or logical thought finds expression in natural 
science, so pure or moral will finds expression in juris- 
prudence (Rechtswissenschaft). The pure will is that will 
divested of all particularity and dependence on private 
inclination, which is presupposed in the moral con- 
sciousness. Such a will is found in a system of individ- 
ual wills governed by law, in which the individual ap- 
pears only in his universal capacity, as a subject of 
rights and duties defined by the system as a whole. 
There is, in other words, no moral will save in the state. 
Individuals are moral only by virtue of their participa- 
tion in the organized group, or by virtue of the juristic 
status which such an organized group confers on them. 
The moral will of the individual is the universal or cor- 
porate will which works in him, and which it is his right 
and duty to realize. 

While in the logic of natural science Natorp differed 
from Cohen in many points of detail, it is in ethics that 
the former displayed his own peculiar bent and genius. 
He found a transition from logic to ethics in the fact 


150 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


that the last word of science is an unfinished task (Auf- 
gabe) pointing beyond experience, an ought-to-be (Sein- 
sollen), over and above the world of being (Sein). 
Ethics is the science of this ideal of reason, which, as 
essentially shared and objective, is the bond that unites 
human wills into a community. Like Plato, Natorp 
thought of individuals as having their true interest and 
rationale in an organized society, and arranged the prac- 
tical activities and corresponding virtues in three stages: 
desire and temperance; regulated will (Willensregelung) 
and courage; reason and truth. These moral levels are 
represented in society by economic, governmental, and 
creative (cultural) activities. To establish the ascen- 
dancy of the creative reason over both industry and 
politics, and thus to unite individuals into a community 
of cultural aspiration, is the object of education, and 
the programme of Natorp’s “idealistic socialism.” 

On the whole it is characteristic of the Marburg school 
to retain intact the threefold structure of the Kantian 
critiques. The data of philosophy are the three great 
systems, natural science, ethics, and art, and the task 
of philosophy is to bring to light their presuppositions 
or implicit reason. But there are two suggestions look- 
ing toward a further unification. In the first place, al- 
though both Cohen and Natorp manifested a rational- 
istic and even positivistic temper in giving first place in 
their systems to the logic of natural science, there was 
(notably in Natorp) a recognition of the fact that even 
the logical reason is a practical or moral activity, di- 
rected to an end. In the second place, both philosophers 
suggested that there is a mode of consciousness embrac- 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 151 


ing logic, morality, and art: for Cohen it was the “cul- 
tural consciousness,’’ and for Natorp the common and 
unifying aspect of subjectivity or immediacy. These 
suggestions point in the direction of the schools of Win- 
delband and Rickert, and of Dilthey and Eucken. 


§20. Ethical and Cultural Idealism in Germany. Windel- 
band. Rickert. Dilthey. Eucken. Simmel 


WILHELM WINDELBAND, who was born in 1848, was 
the founder of a school which, because of his connection 
with Freiburg, Strassburg, and finally (until his death 
in 1915) with Heidelberg, is commonly called the 
“Southwest German School,” or “School of Baden.” 
Although Windelband proceeded in the main directly 
from Kant, he owed much to Lotze’s doctrine of “va- 
lidity’”’ (Geltung).! Influenced also by Kuno Fischer,? 
he gave special attention to the history of philosophy, 
which he treated not as a succession of distinct systems, 
but as a continuous development of ideas, forming part 
of the general process of human culture.? His own 
thought was set forth in a series of addresses and ar- 
ticles, and in an Introduction to Philosophy, published 
in 1914.4 

Starting with the Kantian view of knowledge as con- 
sisting in the formative and synthetic act of judgment, 


1§ 14. 

2 (1824-1907). A famous teacher and historian of philosophy. 

’The most important of his numerous historical writings is the 
Geschichte der Philosophie, 1878-1880; 2d edition, 1892; English trans., 
History of Philosophy, 1893. 

4 Kinleitung in die Philosophie ; 2d edition, 1920; English trans., 1921. 
The Préludien, 1884 (6th edition, 1919), was a compilation of his shorter 
writings. Cf. also his Principien der Logik in vol. I of the Enzyklopddie 
der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 1912. 


152 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


Windelband contended that there is a deeper reflexive 
act in which the judgment itself is claimed to be true or 
false. Over and above ‘‘the intellectual element of 
bringing contents together in a certain relation,” there 
is an act of assent or dissent on the part of the will, 
which defines a realm of validity (Geltung). Truth is not 
a correspondence of ideas to facts, but a satisfaction of 
the fundamental demands of the subject. Since, how- 
ever, it is assumed that truth is wniversally valid, the 
subject which truth satisfies cannot be the particular 
empirical subject, but must be a “logical consciousness 
in general” (logisches Bewusstsein iiberhaupt). The 
sciences which realize the demands of this subject are 
both rational (like mathematics) and empirical. Among 
the empirical sciences there is an important difference 
between the “natural” and the “historical” sciences 
(Naturwissenschaften and  Ceschichtswissenschaften). 
Both are synthetic and selective, in accordance with the 
demands of the subject; but while the former is ‘“‘nomo- 
thetic,” seeking generalization, uniformity, and order, 
and expressing itself in types and laws, the latter is 
‘“diographic,” dealing with concrete individuals in so 
far as these possess some moral, esthetic, or cultural 
value.’ 

Over and above logical value, or validity, there are 
ethical and esthetic values, which in their universality 
again imply the claims of a transcendental subject. 
The moral consciousness, or consciousness of duty, is 
interpreted as the demand upon the individual of a 


1 Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 170-171. 
4 Jbid., pp. 201-208. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 153 


communal will, which is in turn a manifestation of “the 
idea of humanity” or ‘“‘the moral order of the world.” ! 
This universal life expresses itself historically as suc- 
cessive systems of culture,? in whose realization it is the 
duty of the individual actively to participate. A‘sthetic 
values rise above moral values in their freedom from 
that sense of need and incompleteness which accompa- 
nies desire and will; and express themselves most per- 
fectly in the unself-conscious inspiration of genius. 
Religion does not signify a fourth realm of value, but 
only the supersensuous aspect or reference of logical, 
ethical, or esthetic values. Common to all three realms 
is the implication of a normative consciousness (Nor- 
malbewusstsein), whose ideals remain in human ex- 
perience as an unfulfilled aspiration. Religion is the 
demand for their complete realization in the perfect or 
“holy,” or for the overcoming of that duality between 
value and reality which is both the impenetrable mys- 
tery and the essential characteristic of human life. 
Windelband’s thought has been further developed by 
HeinricH Rickert, who succeeded him at Heidelberg 
in 1916.4 Rickert differs from Windelband in a more 

! Introduction to Philosophy, p. 291. 

* Prdludien, edition of 1916, vol. IT, p. 191. 

3 Ibid., p. 358. 

‘He was born in 1863. His most important writings are Der Gegen- 
stand der Erkenntnis, 1892, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftliche 
Begriffsbildung, 1896. Other prominent members of the school were 
Hugo Munstersera (1863-1916), called to America as professor at 
Harvard University in 1892, and eminent in psychology (Grundztige der 
Psychologie, 1900) as well as in philosophy (Philosophie der Werte, 1908; 
English trans., The Eternal Values, 1909); and Max Weber (1864-1920), 
whose Gesammelten Aufsditze zur Religionssoziologie (1920-1922) and other 


writings are of importance in the field of the philosophy of the social 
sciences, especially of economics. 


154 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


explicit and thoroughgoing reduction of the “is” (Sein) 
to the “ought” (Sollen). Being is known to us only as 
an object of judgment, but “the peculiar logical essence 
of judgment is affirmation and denial, approval or dis- 
approval, or an attitude to a value.” ! In other words, 
the knowing subject pronounces judgment in obedience 
to the requirements of an “ought,’’ which it recognizes 
as binding upon it, and therefore as independent of its 
private inclination. This ideal objectivity transcends all 
actuality and all subjectivity, not as being unrelated 
to them, but as being a standard to which they are 
obliged to conform. Taken in the context of knowledge 
at least, there is no meaning in the “‘is,”’ without an 
ulterior reference to what is valid (gilt) or true. “It is 
valid or true or good that ‘a’ should be ‘b,’”’ underlies 
the simple ‘‘a is b”’ of the empirical consciousness. Thus 
Rickert’s philosophy centres in the Kantian “primacy 
of the practical reason,” and has been characterized as 
“‘neo-Fichteanism.” 

Rickert was first concerned to distinguish between 
the ‘ought’ and the “‘is,”’ or between value and actu- 
ality (Wert and Wirklichkeit), but felt also the need of 
reconciling them, as two aspects of the same being, or 
original felt immediacy, which he characterized as ‘‘im- 
manent meaning” (¢mmanent Sinn). A problem of 
unification arose also within the realm of values itself. 
The logical consciousness has its own peculiar duty to 
perform, and its own peculiar norms or categories. In 
obedience to these norms the cognitive subject develops 


1 Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, 1904, p. 108. 
2 System der Philosophie, 1921, vol. I, pp. 235-255. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 155 


two groups of sciences: the natural sciences, which gen- 
eralize and explain in terms of laws; and the cultural 
and historical sciences,! which deal with concrete indi- 
viduals and activities. The sciences of culture are thus 
governed by the norms of the logical subject. But, on 
the other hand, science is itself a branch of culture, hay- 
ing its historical development. It belongs, along with 
esthetics and the mystical experience (der Mystik), to 
the “contemplative” and asocial branch of culture, 
which is contrasted with the “active”’ branch; the lat- 
ter embracing ethics, the pursuit of happiness (die Hro- 
tik), and religion (the pursuit of perfection). There is 
thus a rivalry in Rickert between a tendency to subject 
culture to the demands of the theoretical consciousness, 
as being the content of a special branch of science; and 
a tendency to subject science to the demands of a more 
general consciousness, as being a special branch of cul- 
ture. 


This latter tendency, so pronounced in Windelband 
and Rickert, to accept the history of culture as the ulti- 
mate object of philosophy, or to view reality as the 
progressive unfolding of a universal life, whose norms 
are embodied with equal authority in science, morality, 
and art, found its most radical and consistent expres- 
sion in WILHELM DiuruEy (1833-1912). This philoso- 
pher, who succeeded Lotze at Berlin in 1882, distin- 
guished himself as a biographer of Schleiermacher and 


1 Kulturwissenschaften or Geschichtswissenschaften. Rickert rejects the 
conception of “spiritual sciences” (Geisteswissenschaften) because he re- 
gards psychology as one of the natural sciences. 


156 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


Hegel, and as a critic and historian of literature.!. Ow- 
ing to his broad cultural interests, he was many-sided 
both in his sources and in his influence; and his philoso- 
phy, being essentially unsystematic, never found any 
unified expression.? 

Dilthey’s central doctrine was the immediately ap- 
prehended ‘“‘coherence of life’? (Lebenszusammenhang) 
which expresses or objectifies itself in a “world-view” 
(Weltanschauwung). In his doctrine of an inner revela- 
tion or active, personal experience (Hrlebnis) of life, he 
approximated the position of spiritualism, as opposed 
to that of criticism; and in conceiving “life” as em- 
bracing cognitive, moral, and esthetic factors in a sin- 
gle, irrational creative impulse, he approximates the 
position of romanticism, as distinguished from both the 
logical emphasis of the Marburg school and the moral 
emphasis of the school of Baden. 

The difference between the natural and spiritual sci- 
ences for Dilthey is the difference between objective 
cognition (Erkennen) and the sympathetic insight (Ver- 
stehen) by which we grasp the inwardness of life. This 
sympathetic insight extends beyond ourselves, and 
enables us to realize the unity of the great cultural mani- 
festations of life. Here Dilthey turned, as did Windel- 
band and Rickert, to a philosophy of history. We can- 


1 Leben Schletermachers, 1870; Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels, 1905; Die 
Einbildungskraft des Dichters, 1887; Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, 1905. 

2 The most important writings for the purpose of understanding Dil- 
they’s fundamental position are the Einleitung in die Geisteswissen- 
schaften, 1883; Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissen- 
schaften, 1910; Weltanschauung, Philosophie und Religion, 1911. 

* Weltanschauung, etc., pp. 7, 29. 

4 Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt, etc., p. 10. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 157 


not deduce the course of history from any set of first 
principles, but we learn the rich possibilities of life from 
its progressive unfolding in modes of general outlook 
or world-view, each of which is relative to special social 
and natural conditions. Every such world-view is at 
one and the same time a conception of reality, an order 
of values, and a governing purpose.'! Of such world- 
views Dilthey recognized three general types: natural- 
asm, which is materialistic, utilitarian, and determinis- 
tic; zdealism of the subjective or active type, in which 
mind is conceived as free and creative; and objective 
idealism, which expresses itself in a contemplation of 
the universal harmony. The first is exemplified by 
Hobbes and Hume; the second by Plato and the post- 
Kantians; the third by Spinoza and Goethe. 


Dilthey’s use of the historical and psychological 
methods, his cultural preoccupations and his insistence 
on life as the central reality and the proper theme of 
philosophy, have had a widely pervasive influence upon 
contemporary German thought. His immediate follow- 
ers have interpreted his “sympathetic insight” (Ver- 
stehen) in terms of the scale of values which is charac- 
teristic of the personal life, and have made a moral- 
psychological study of mental “types” distinguished 
by the dominance of some one end over others.? Dil- 
they’s philosophy also pointed in the direction of two 


1 Weltanschauung, etc., p. 28. 

2Cf., e.g., E. Spranger, Lebensformen, 1922. A similar view of the 
task and réle of philosophy as self-expression and as interpretation of 
life appears in H. v. Keyserling, Unsterblichkeit, 1907. Cf. also E. 
Tréltsch (Die Bedeutung der Geschichte fiir die Weltanschauung, 1917), 
in whom the intluence of Dilthey blends with that of Rickert. 


158 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


relatively independent developments, an activistic spir- 
itualism, and a, historical relativism. The former direc- 
tion of thought is represented by RupoLtpH HKucKEn, 
pupil of Trendelenburg,' professor of philosophy at 
Basel and Jena, and a writer of wide popularity, both 
in Germany and abroad.? Eucken is an eloquent parti- 
san of spiritualism and idealism against both the nat- 
uralistic philosophy and what he deemed to be the 
deadening and confusing influences of modern life. Like 
Dilthey he finds in the history of philosophy the record 
of a spiritual movement to be interpreted in terms of 
an immediate revelation of the inwardness of life. But 
his philosophy, like that of Fichte, which it resembles 
throughout, is a call to arms rather than a historical 
survey. Spirit is essentially action and struggle, in 
which there is resistance to be overcome and a victory 
to be won. Life is a deed, and there is no deed without 
a duality of agent and object (Keine Tat ohne Zwetheit).3 
The world is to be construed in terms of the demands 
of the fullest and most active personal life. This method 
of taking as the principle of truth the requirements of 
the whole of life, rather than of the mere intellect, he 
calls the ‘‘noological’”’ method.‘ The world is in a sense 


1§ 14. 

2 Born in 1846. His principal writings are: Die Hinhett des Geisteslebens 
in Bewusstsein und Tat der Menschheit, 1888; Die Lebensanschauungen 
der grossen Denker, 1890 (English trans., The Problem of Human Life, 
etc., 1909); Der Wahrhettsgehalt der Religion, 1901 (English trans., The 
Truth of Religion, 1901); Das Wesen der Religion, 1901; Grundlinien 
einer neuen Lebensanschauung, 1907 (English trans., Life’s Basis and 
Life's Ideal, 1912); Geistige Strémungen der Gegenwart, 3d editio,n 1904 
(English trans., Main Currents of Modern Thought, 1912). 

® Die Einheit des Geisteslebens, etc., p. 354 and passim. 

4 Grundlinien, etc., pp. 119 ff. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 159 


what we make it. Although Eucken’s philosophy is 
thus a philosophy of faith and of action, it does not 
employ these categories in any limiting sense. All 
knowledge is faith in the sense that it springs from the 
exigencies of action, but the activity whose urge is thus 
obeyed is that of a universally immanent spirit. 


While Eucken thus represents the bolder metaphysi- 
cal implications of Dilthey’s thought, Grora SIMMEL 
(1858-1918) construed in more empirical terms Dil- 
they’s view that philosophies and other cultural mani- 
festations are relative to the special circumstances under 
which they arise. His interest lay not in metaphysical, 
nor even in historical, generalizations, but in the de- 
tailed study of the way in which ideas and ideals arise 
in response to specific human needs, and in relation to 
concrete human situations. Assuming, in common with 
the whole neo-Kantian school, that the spirit constructs 
its own world, he recognized no universal a priori prin- 
ciples by which this construction is determined and 
rationalized, but described it in psychological and so- 
ciological terms. Thus in his famous Philosophy of 
Money' he traced the change in the meaning or func- 
tion of money, from a qualitatively distinct thing, hav- 
ing a, value in itself, to a symbol and measure of power. 
Similarly in his ethics, he claimed no final and valid 
standard, but devoted himself to a study of the genesis 
of such typical concepts as ‘‘ought,”’ or “egoism”’ and 
“altruism,” and the particular contexts from which 


1 Philosophie des Geldes, 1900. Simmel has an important place in the 
development of modern sociology. Cf. his Sozzoloaie, 1908. 


160 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


they derive their meaning.! All categories are for Sim- 
mel evolved in a certain setting and possessed of a lim- 
ited and relative truth, in so far as they fit that setting. 
This relativity is itself the only possible philosophical 
generalization. A tendency always to transcend its own 
achievements, or to pass from a relative truth to an 
absolute, which in turn becomes relative in the light of 
an ulterior absolute, is the very essence of life.? 
Eucken’s emphasis on the deed, and Simmel’s inter- 
pretation of truth in terms of a life-process which re- 
fuses to be embraced under any fixed system of cate- 
gories, suggest a transition from idealism of the ortho- 
dox Kantian type to the new movement variously 
known as neo-vitalism, activism, or pragmatism.® 


§21. The New Idealism in Italy. Croce. Gentile 


The recent development of idealism in Germany re- 
veals a tendency to interpret thought not in terms of 
its finished product, or in terms of its ideal implications, 
but rather in terms of its actual process in human life. 
This tendency to activism and historicity, freed, so far 
as possible, from every taint of biologism or utilitarian- 
ism, appears in the so-called ‘new idealism,’ which is 
the most conspicuous movement in contemvorary Ital- 
ian thought. 

BENEDETTO CrocE may be considered as a descen- 
dant of German idealism of the post-Kantian type, and 
also as an exponent of the Italian national tradition. 


1 Finlettung in der Moralwissenschaft, 1892-1893. 

2 This characteristic self-transcendence of life (Uber-sich-selbst-hinaus- 
gehen, Sich-selbst-iiberwinden) is developed in the s.uthor’s Lebensan- 
schauung, 1918, and Philosophie des Lebens, 1920. 

3 §§ 22-25. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 161 


The emphasis on history and universal culture, which 
was characteristic of German thought in the nineteenth 
century, had in Italy found a much earlier expression 
in Vico, the philosopher of the Renaissance whom Croce 
himself did much to rehabilitate;! and was also repre- 
sented among Croce’s early contemporaries by notable 
men of letters, such as De Sanctis and Carducci.? Croce, 
like Vico, came to philosophy by way of historical and 
linguistic interests. Born in 1866, in the province of 
Aquila of a Neapolitan family, he settled in Naples, 
after his university studies in Rome, and adopted the 
career of a private scholar. This career has been in- 
terrupted only by occasional periods of service in public 
office, as senator and as minister of public instruction. 

Beginning as a student of Neapolitan history, he 
first widened the range of his erudition and then deep- 
ened his reflection upon it. As his philosophy grew out 
of his brooding upon history, so it culminated in the 
doctrine that philosophy zs history. The essence of this 
paradoxical statement consists in the rejection of the 
common distinction between history as a series of 
events, and history as a knowledge of these events. 
The events of history are actions, which imply knowl- 
edge, while the knowledge of these events implies a re- 
enacting, as well as a rejudging, of them. The past is 
history only in so far as it is being relived in the pres- 
ent, and there is no essential difference between those 
who live in history and those who make history live. 
History is thus perpetually made and remade by the 


1 Giovanni Battista Vico, 16687-1744. Cf. Croce’s La Filosofia di 
Giambattista Vico, 1911. 
? Francesco De Sanctis, 1817-1883; Gisué Carducci, 1835-1907. =», 


162 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


reflective performance of man, who brings to bear such 
philosophy as he has in him.! 

Although Croce follows Hegel in his basic idealism 
and in his view of reality as a spiritual life of which the 
driving force is a conflict of opposites, he rejects the 
latter’s ‘“‘panlogism.” ? This modification of Hegel has 
had two effects. On the one hand, reality is with Croce 
unambiguously identified with the actual process of 
spirit, rather than with its eternal or “‘absolute”’ logical 
structure; while, on the other hand, Croce recognizes 
the autonomy of the several non-logical manifestations 
of spirit such as art and nature. Croce’s philosophy is 
notable for its pluralistic flavor and breadth of inclu- 
siveness. It is unfolded in three main works, the 
Aisthetic, the Logic, and the Philosophy of the Practical, 
the last embracing Economics and Ethics, and the whole 
setting forth the four fundamental forms of human 
activity.? 

Rejecting every sort of transcendence, there will be 
as many aspects of reality as there are modes of con- 
scious life. The latter is divisible into the theoretic and 
the practical consciousness, of which the first is again 
divisible into intuition and intellect. Intuition is genu- 

1 Logic, English trans., p. 494. Cf. Teoria e Storia della Storiographia, 
1920 (English trans., History, Its Theory and Practice, 1921). 

2 Saggio sullo Hegel, 1913 (English trans., What Is Living and What 
Is Dead in the Philosephy of Hegel, 1915). 

’The work on History, mentioned above, constitutes the fourth vol- 
ume of the Filosofia dello Spirito. The other volumes appeared as fol- 
lows: Estetica come scienza dell’ espressione e linguistica generale, 1902 
(English trans., A’sthetic, 1909); Logica come scienza del conceito puro, 
1905 (English trans., Logic, 1917); Filosofia della Pratica: Economica ed 
Etica, 1909 (English trans., The Philosophy of the Practical, 1913). His 
writings include, in addition to the above, a large number of essays 


(many contributed to his review called La Critica) and of works in lit- 
erary and political history. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 163 


ine knowledge, distinguished by its immediacy and by 
the concrete individuality of its objects. It embraces 
not only the field of perception but also that of imagi- 
nation and feeling, since it is prior to the distinction be- 
tween existence and non-existence. It embraces spatial 
and temporal characters as parts of its content, but it 
is not a spatio-temporal system, as in Kant’s Asthetic. 
It has, in fact, no universal forms, save only that of 
consciousness itself. Nor is it passive and meaningless 
like pure sensation. The most original feature of Croce’s 
view of intuition is his contention that it is essentially 
communicative or expressive. This does not mean that 
all intuition must be outwardly expressed in words or 
in works of art, but that the intuition itself is already 
an expression. Intuition is itself creative art, the artist 
in the usual and narrower sense being simply the man 
whose intuitions are extraordinarily clear and vivid, and 
who knows how to give them physical embodiment. 
The distinction between form and content in art is 
therefore a false one, since there is no content that is 
not already intuitively formed. In other words, no one 
has anything to say (in the sense of overt speech) unless 
he has inwardly already said it. 

The intellectual mode of consciousness is that in 
which concepts are employed in acts of judgment claim- 
ing a universal validity. All judgments are, however, 
in the last analysis individual judgments, arising in a 
particular context and applied to concrete objects! pro- 
vided by intuition. Thus, while intuition is possible 
without conceptual knowledge, the latter implies intui- 
tion as an antecedent stage. 


1 As, for example, in narrative history. 


164 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


But not all that goes by the name of thinking has 
theoretical validity. Genuine or logical thinking is that 
which employs the “pure concepts,’’ that is, concepts 
such as quantity, quality, existence, development, 
beauty, or final cause, which are applicable to all indi- 
viduals, or which are both concrete and universal. 
With these Croce contrasts the “pseudo-concepts”’ of 
science, including the empirical concepts which are ap- 
plicable only to limited portions of reality, and are use- 
ful for purposes of classification; and the abstract con- 
cepts of mathematics which are not applicable to reality 
at all, but are useful for purposes of measurement. 
Physical nature is the product of these pseudo-con- 
cepts, which are to beregarded not as means of theoreti- 
cal insight but as instruments of the will. They are 
conventions, artifices, fictions, having a purely method- 
ological convenience. Thus Croce, following Mach and 
Avenarius, and in agreement with his contemporaries 
of the pragmatic school, adopts the economical theory 
of scientific concepts.! 

“Man understands things with the theoretical form, 
with the practical form he changes them.” ? This form, 
also, appears in two grades, the useful or economical 
activity and the moral activity. ‘‘Economy is, as it 
were, the Aisthetic of practical life; Morality its Logic.” 
Both are manifestations of will; in both cases to will is 
to intend or to adopt an end, and move toward its exe- 
cution, whether or no this proceeds to overt action; 
and both presuppose knowledge, since will is always the 


1 Logic, English trans., pp. 46-49. Cf. §§ 11, 22-25. 
2 Aisthetic, English trans., p. 78. 3 Ibid., p. 89. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 165 


expression of some interpretation of the concrete situa- 
tion in which the agent finds himself. The difference 
lies in that the economic activity is directed to individ- 
ual, and the moral to universal, ends. Economic activ- 
ity is prudential and opportunistic, whereas morality 
is disinterestedly devoted to the higher and irreducible 
issues of goodness and virtue. As in the case of theoretic 
activity, so here, also, the second grade presupposes the 
first. There may be utility without morality, but there 
can be no actions having moral value without being 
also economic or useful, as the action of an individual 
in relation to other individuals. 

Such unity as is retained by Croce’s system as a whole 
is to be sought in his conceptions of “distinction” and 
“opposition,” ! as applied to the four fundamental divi- 
sions of the conscious life. Beauty, Truth, Utility, and 
Goodness are not opposed, and there is no dialectical 
relation between them by which (after the manner of 
Hegel) one generates the other as its contradictory op- 
posite. This being the case, art and science are not to 
be treated as forms of error or as bad philosophy; and 
there is no Justification for the Hegelian attempt to 
substitute a philosophy of art for art, or a philosophy 
of science for science. Art as it is to the artist, and 
science as it is to the scientist, are not falsifying ab- 
stractions which have to be corrected and superseded, 
but are themselves intact modes of spirit, to be incor- 
porated as they stand in the richer fulness of reality. 

The unity among these autonomous realms lies in the 
fact that they cannot be understood except as distin- 

1 Logic, English trans., pp. 99 ff. 


166 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


guished from one another, and as forming an orderly 
progression. They form a whole whose parts are recip- 
rocally and integrally intelligible, as a circle or closed 
system of the forms of spirit all of which are virtually 
present in every reality. The relation of opposition 
holds not between these realms, but within each realm, 
as the relation between the affirmation and the nega- 
tion of its characteristic principle or value; that is, be- 
tween beauty and ugliness, truth and error, utility and 
disutility, good and evil. While there is thus a negative 
implication in each value, nothing is or can be wholly 
without value. Thus the “unreal’’ must have intuitive 
value, or beauty; while error and moral evil must have 
economic value, or utility. Opposition is nevertheless 
significant in that it reveals the fundamental dynamic 
quality of reality as a spiritual activity which both suc- 
ceeds and fails, or which succeeds only by struggle and 
overcoming. 


GIOVANNI GENTILE! exceeds even Croce in his insist- 
ence that reality is identical with the actual, historical 
process of human thought, there being no absolute or 
static being, no universal whole to which thought is 
obliged to conform. The reality is this world as it is 
freely made and remade in the course of actual think- 
ing. Whatever happens here happens to reality in the 

1 Born 1875. L’atto del pensare come aito puro, 1912 (English trans., 
The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, 1922); Le origin deela filosofia contem- 
poranea in Italia, 1917-1921; The Reform of Education, 1922, revision 
and English translation of lectures given in Trieste immediately after 
the war. The last book (cf. ch. X) contains a brief popular résumé of 


the author’s philosophy, and the Introduction, by Croce, contains a 
statement by the latter of his relation to Gentile. 


SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM 167 


most ultimate and inclusive sense of the term. The 
thinker which thus generates the world is not human in 
the naturalistic or limiting sense. There is a pure and 
universal spirit, having its own essential and abiding 
nature, and its inherent order of categories and phases, 
but manifesting itself and manifesting only, in the 
thinking activity of man. 

But while Gentile’s thought retains the features 
broadly characteristic of the ‘new idealism,” he rejects 
what is pluralistic in Croce. To accept the division of 
spirit into distinct realms is to belie its essential unity. 
Spirit must be so conceived as to generate multiplicity 
out of itself without loss of identity. The key to such a 
view of spirit is afforded by self-consciousness, in which 
consciousness makes an object of itself and in so doing 
changes itself. It is the same spirit which is both sub- 
ject and object, both creator and created. Conscious- 
ness in its subjective aspect is art, in its objective aspect 
religion, and in its reflective synthesis,—or subject-mak- 
ing-an-object-of-itself,—philosophy. Thus it is philoso- 
phy which most perfectly reveals the nature of spirit; 
and since it is the life of spirit which constitutes the 
universe, one is led again, although in a somewhat mod- 
ified sense, to the teaching that history, philosophiz- 
ing, and reality are all one.? 


1 While the new idealism of Croce and Gentile flourishes mainly in 
Italy, it has exercised no little influence in other countries, notably in 
England, where it numbers among its followers J. A. Smith (“The Phi- 
losophy of Giovanni Gentile,’”’ and other articles in the Proceedings of 
the Aristotelian Society, 1914-1920; and The Nature of Art, 1924); and 
H. Wildon Carr (The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, 1917; and The Gen- 
eral Principle of Relativity, 1920). 


PART IV 


VITALISM, VOLUNTARISM, AND PRAGMATISM 
§22. The Will to Power. Nietzsche 


Both idealism and spiritualism affirm the priority of 
mind to physical reality, the former in respect of knowl- 
edge, the latter in respect of being. The essential nature 
of mind being revealed on the plane of human self- 
consciousness, its categories are accordingly those of 
thought, moral will, esthetic feeling, or artistic genius. 
But it is possible to hold that its essential nature is 
revealed upon a more primitive plane, in irrational de- 
sire, sense-perception, blind will, instinct, or life. These 
possibilities provide a gradation of views in which spir- 
itualism approximates naturalism. According to a 
strict spiritualism, the key to reality is to be found in 
logic, ethics, or zesthetics. According to an intermedi- 
ate view, widely held in the eighteenth century, this 
key is to be found in psychology. Progression in this 
direction leads finally to the view that the key is to be 
found in biology. This view may be identified with 
spiritualism, in that it subsumes physics and chemistry 
under a “higher”’ science; or it may be identified with 
naturalism, on the ground that it subsumes logic and 
ethics under a ‘“‘lower”’ science. Or, if we conceive the 
sciences to form an order from physics through biology 
to logic, ethics, and esthetics (the so-called “normative 
sciences’’), we may say that naturalism reduces to phys- 
ics, and spiritualism to the normative sciences; while the 


third view reduces both ends to the middle, or conceives 
168 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 169 


both physics and the normative sciences in terms of 
biology. 

This third view is known as witalism,! when the in- 
tention is to affirm the irreducibility of life to physico- 
chemical terms; it is known as voluntarism (or activ- 
asm), when the intention is to identify life and will, and 
so to obtain a biological interpretation of the content 
of psychology; it is known as pragmatism or instrumen- 
talism, when the intention is to extend biological cate- 
gories to the normative sciences, and in particular to 
logic. An exponent of this general type of philosophy 
may emphasize one of these aspects, but can scarcely 
fail to manifest all three. 


FRIEDRICH NIeETZSCHE represents this general ten- 
dency in its cultural and moral applications, and in the 
manner of the poet and reformer rather than of the 
systematic philosopher. The individualistic emphasis 
of this tendency, which is always marked, finds in 
Nietzsche its most extreme and powerful exponent. 
He was born in 1844, and the earliest formative influ- 
ences on his thought were received from the teachings 
of Schopenhauer, from his personal friendship with the 
great composer Richard Wagner,’? and from his studies 

1A movement known as “neo-vitalism’ began in Germany with 
Johannes Reinke (b. 1849; Die Welt als Tat, 1899). Its most eminent 
representative is Hans Drisescu (b. 1867): Der Vitalismus als Geschichte 
und Lehre, 1905 (English trans., History and Theory of Vitalism, 1914); 
Philosophie des Organischen, 1908; Wirklichkevtslehre, 1917. Two works 
published in English, Science and Philosophy of the Organism, 1908, and 
The Problems of Individuality, 1914, contain translations from several 
German originals together with added matter. 


2 1813-1883. Wagner was influenced by Feuerbach and Hartmann, 
as well as by Schopenhauer. 


170 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


of classical antiquity,—this last interest leading to his 
appointment as professor of philology at Basel in 1869. 
His first important work, The Birth of Tragedy,! was an 
interpretation of history as a conflict between the prin- 
ciples of Dionysus and of Apollo, the first representing 
the blind but rich and inexhaustible force of life, the 
latter the balance, repose, and harmony of form. Al- 
though Nietzsche saw in history the inevitable and fer- 
tilizing conflict of these principles, it was the first which 
he emphasized, and which he found embodied in the 
philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Wagner. 
But while he admired the voluntarism of Schopenhauer 
and the Szegfried of Wagner, he revolted against the 
former’s cult of resignation and the latter’s Christian- 
ized Parsifal. At the same time that he thus diverged 
from his earlier masters he came under the influence of 
naturalism both in its positive and in its negative as- 
pects. Positively, he adopted the standpoint of scien- 
tific biology; negatively, he accepted the gospel of dis- 
illusionment;? in both he sought refuge from the too 
easy and too edifying enthusiasms of romanticism. To 
this naturalistic stage of his development belong his 
Human, All Too Human, and his Joyful Wisdom.’ 
Finally, in his Zarathustra and later works* he found a 
unity of his own in the philosophy of “the will to 

1 Die Geburt der Tragédie aus dem Geist der Musik, 1872 (English trans., 
rye this which attracted him to Voltaire. 

8 Menschliches, Allzwmenschliches, 1878 (English trans., 1909-1911); 
Die fréhliche Wissenschaft, 1882 (English trans., 1910). 

4 Also sprach Zarathustra, 1882 (English trans., Thus Spake Zarathus- 
tra, 1909); Jenserts von Gut und Bése, 1886 (English trans., Beyond Good 
and Evil, 1907); Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887 (English trans., The 


Genealogy of Morals, 1910); Der Wille zur Macht (incomplete), 1888 
(English trans., The Will to Power, 1909-1910). 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 171 


power,” which is both the Dionysian principle in cul- 
ture and the vital principle in nature. Meanwhile his 
failing health, which was in part a result of work in 
the ambulance service during the Franco-Prussian War, 
and which had compelled him to abandon his professor- 
ship in 1879, aggravated his extreme sensitiveness and 
emotional instability. A stroke of paralysis produced, 
early in 1889, a state of entire mental collapse which 
lasted until his death in 1900. 

In the naturalistic phase of his thought Nietzsche 
abandoned his earlier leanings toward a spiritualistic 
metaphysics, and adopted the standpoint of biology. 
But while in so doing he was greatly influenced by Dar- 
win, he was a Darwinian only in a limited sense.! Life 
is essentially a force of self-assertion (“a living thing 
seeks above all to discharge its strength”), and evolu- 
tion, or the “ascent of the line of life,” ? is the triumph 
of strength over weakness. Adaptation, or a passive 
submission to the environment, is the very opposite of 
life. The course of evolution is determined by the will: 
those survive who will survive. This is both a descrip- 
tion of fact, a practical appeal, and a standard of value. 
The good life is the life which by the might of its supe- 
riority both can survive and deserves to survive. There 
is but one obligation upon man, which is to stretch his 
powers to their limit, and thus to become “super-man.” 
“The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your 
will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the 
earth.” ® 


1§ 6. 
2 Beyond Good and Evil, § 13; Will to Power, p. 674. Cf. §§ 491-492. 
3’ Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue, § 3. 


172 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


In terms of this central vitalistic and voluntaristic 
conception Nietzsche interpreted knowledge, ethics, and 
religion. He was not interested in proofs, but rather in 
the psychology, of that which calls itself knowledge. 
Psychology is “the path to the fundamental problems.”’! 
Nietzsche’s own belief that “the world seen from with- 
in” is “Will to Power, and nothing else,” ? has to be 
accepted as a sort of initial revelation, confirmed by the 
fact that once granted it provides an explanation of all 
other beliefs. Thus the belief in the reality of objects 
arises from “the sensations of strength, struggle, and 
resistance.”’* “The greater part of the conscious think- 
ing of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his in- 
stincts.” Behind all logic there are “physiological de- 
mands for the maintenance of a definite mode of life.” 
Man could not live without “logical fictions,” errors, 
falsity, foolishness—the only question being “how far 
an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species- 
preserving, perhaps species-rearing.”’ All philosophy is 
a “confession, a sort of “involuntary and unconscious 
autobiography.’ ”” 4 The deeper truth of the disillu- 
sioned will to power is revealed only to the initiated, 
or to a sort of intellectual aristocracy. It would be 
cheapened and vulgarized by general agreement. It is 
not attested by its contributions to “happiness and vir- — 
tue,” but rather by its dangerousness, or by the fact 
that only the strong can endure it.’ The supreme test 
of the strong man is his ability to endure the vision of 


1 Beyond Good and Evil, § 23. 2 Thid., § 36. 
* Will to Power, vol. II, $§ 533, 552. 
‘ Ibid., §§ 3, 4, 6. ‘ Tbid., §§ 39, 43. 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 173 


that ‘eternal recurrence”? which is the fundamental 
law of nature. He will endure it because his very 
strength ennobles existence and makes tolerable the 
thought of its eternity.! 

Turning to “the genealogy of our moral prejudices,”’ 
Nietzsche finds that the root of all value is to be found 
in the superior man’s sense of his own nobility.2 The 
- true ethics, which serves as the norm by which to judge 
the diversity of moral codes, is this aristocratic ethics 
of self-affirmation and mastery. Any moral code is to 
be condemned which does not promote “the maximum 
potentiality of the power and splendor of the human spe- 
cies.”’ Judged by this standard the traditional code of 
self-denial and commiseration, “the morality of pity,” 
is ‘the most sinister symptom of our modern European 
civilization.”’ * It is the code of the slavish herd, a code 
of envy and helplessness, which since it disparages no- 
bility and idealizes weakness is the very inverse of true 
morality. . 

Christianity itself is judged and condemned by the 
same standard. It is not a question of proving or dis- 
proving God’s existence, but of determining the enno- 
bling or degrading effect of the Christian cult. The 
Christian God is to be rejected because as conceived by 
- Christianity he is not divine. The “Christian God”’ is 
_ “the poor people’s God,” “one of the most corrupt con- 
cepts of God ever arrived at on earth,” because “every- 
thing strong, brave, domineering, and proud has been 


1 Thus Spake Zarathustra, part III, ch. LX. 
-. 2 Genealogy of Morals, Preface, § 2, and First Essay, § 2. 
8 Ibid., Preface, §§ 5, 6. 


174 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


eliminated”? out of it; it is ““God degenerated to the 
contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration 
and its eternal yea!’’} 


§ 23. The Impulse to Life. Bergson 


Henri Bercson is affiliated with the French spiri- 
tualistic movement represented by Ravaisson, Lache- 
lier, and Boutroux, but he is none the less sharply dis- 
tinguished by his naturalistic leanmgs. While French 
spiritualism proclaims the fundamental reality of the 
creative will, this reality is held to reveal itself most 
profoundly in its higher flights—in thought, morality, 
art, and religion.? While will as active and free is prior 
to reason construed as passive necessity, this is only 
because will is itself essentially rational, in the sense of 
being governed by its own inherent ends of truth, good- 
ness, beauty, and universality. With Bergson, on the 
other hand, the essential nature of metaphysical reality 
is revealed in the natural life and consciousness. Phi- 
losophy takes as its point of departure not the stand- 
ards and ideals of the normative sciences, but the em- 
pirical content of biology and psychology. Instead of 
substituting a soaring intellectual faculty or aspiring 


1The Antichrist, §§ 17, 18 (English trans., The Case of Wagner, etc., 
1896, pp. 257-258). 

2 The most distinguished contemporary exponent of this French tra- 
dition is Maurice Blondel (b. 1861; L’ Action, 1893; Le Proces de lV Intelli- 
gence, 1922). Blondel affirms the primacy of will. His method, however, 
is that of rigorous proof (adapted to the circumstance that in the 
knowledge of the will the knower and the known are one); and he dis- 
tinguishes over and above the empirical will of biology and psychology 
a deeper metaphysical will, which is universal, and which expresses itself 
in the ideals of ethics and religion. 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 175 


reason for the mundane categories of natural science, 
Bergson disparages all rational or conceptual thought 
in behalf of instinct and intuition. Nor is the failure 
of intellect to grasp reality merely an accidental effect 
of man’s limited experience, as with Bradley, but it is 
a radical failure. Intellect misrepresents and falsifies 
reality, and in endeavoring to remedy its own defects 
it only aggravates them. Its failure is due to the fact 
that reality does not possess that systematic and logical 
structure which the intellect represents, but a fluidity, 
mobility, continuity, and perpetual novelty, which is 
given only in the immediate and sympathetic sense of 
life. 

Bergson was born in 1859 and was for twenty years 
(1901-1921) professor at the Collége de France. His 
brilliancy of style, the cosmopolitan and versatile qual- 
ity of his genius, and the daring and novelty of his ideas 
have given him an influence greater than that of any 
other living philosopher. His three principal works all 
adopt a psychological or biological point of departure. 
The Immediate Data of Consciousness’ distinguishes be- 
tween the fundamental self whose states are inseparably 
fused and “interpenetrating,” and the “spatialized”’ 
self of discrete states; ascribing freedom to the former, 
and determinism to the latter. Matter and Memory? in- 
vestigates the relation of mind and body, and affirms 
that consciousness in the form of ‘‘pure memory”’ is in- 
dependent of the brain, which is an instrument of action. 


1 Hssai sur les Données immédiates de la Conscience, 1889 (English 
trans., Time and Free Will, 1910). 

2 Matitre et Mémoire: Essai sur la Relation du Corps avec ! Esprit, 1896 
(English trans., 1911). 


176 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


Finally, Creative Evolution! traces the course of this 
game active reality in the physical cosmos, where, as- 
suming the forms of plant and animal life, it opposes 
and overcomes the resistance of inert matter. 

The entire philosophy is pervaded by a fundamental 
duality which appears in many forms, such as spirit 
and matter, life and mechanism, time and space, free- 
dom and determinism, interpenetration and juxtaposi- 
tion, spontaneity and rigidity, intuition and intellect. 
This duality can best be approached through the last 
of these oppositions, as being the most radical and dis- 
tinctive. 

Bergson’s view of knowledge begins with a distinction 
between perception and memory in their purity—a dis- 
tinction of kind and not of degree.2 Pure perception 
coincides with ever-changing present existence; it par- 
ticipates in the immediately given reality, following its 
changes, prolonging them in bodily movements, and 
having an intimation of their infinite spread and con- 
tinuity. Pure memory, on the other hand, is the whole 
past preserved in the shape of unconscious psychical 
states, unlocalized, and irrelevant to the present mo- 
ment of action. 

But perception and memory in their purity are thus 
distinguished only in order to trace their interaction. 
That which merges them, or qualifies the one by the 


1 [’ Evolution créatrice, 1907 (English trans., 1911). The most impor- 
tant of his other writings are: Le Rire, 1900 (English trans., Laughter, 
1911); ‘‘ Introduction 4 la Métaphysique,” in Revue de Métaphysique et 
de Morale, 1903 (English trans., 1912); L’ Energie spirituelle, 1920 (Eng- 
lish trans., Mind-Energy, 1920); Durée et Simultanéité, 1922. 

2 Matter and Memory, English trans., p. 72. 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 177 


other, is the body; which is not an organ of representa- 
tion, or “maker of images,” but a ‘centre of action,” 
employing both perception and memory, and binding 
the two together for practical purposes. Ordinary per- 
ception is not, like pure perception, preoccupied with the 
object, but introduces memory, which evokes from the 
remoter past “‘those former perceptions which are anal- 
ogous to the present perception”’; and so suggests “‘that 
decision which is the most useful.” At the same time, 
memory focusses or ‘“‘condenses”’ the immediate past; 
and so “by allowing us to grasp in a single intuition 
multiple moments of duration, it frees us from the 
movement of the flow of things, that is to say, from the 
rhythm of necessity.” ? 

Similarly, ordinary memory is restricted to those 
images which are relevant to the present. Pure memory 
is the whole past indiscriminately preserved, the deep 
reservoir of spiritual energy which in the interest of 
present action has to be held below the threshold of 
waking consciousness, and allowed to manifest itself 
only in so far as it is appropriate and useful. In dreams, 
delirium, hallucination, false recognition, insanity, or 
revery the flood-gates are inadvertently opened, and 
consciousness, though enriched, loses touch with actual- 
ities. Normally this under-mind is drawn upon only 
so far as it can be brought to bear on the present prac- 
tical situation, and it is only memory in this limited 
sense of vigilant and economical recall that is dependent 
on the body.” 


1 Matter and Memory, p. 303. Cf. pp. 81 ff. 
2 Mind-Energy, English trans., II, IV, VY. 


178 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


Thus ordinary perception is not a theoretic contem- 
plation of reality, but a plan of action. The object is 
reduced to that which is to be done about it. The very 
cleavages that divide one object from another are an 
effect of artificial isolation. The perceived object tends 
to become little more than a sign of what is to be ex- 
pected, or an occasion for drawing upon the past as a 
euide for the future. The corporeal aspects of the world 
—its static, orderly, spatial, and quantitative charac- 
ters, are an effect of fixation and abridgment; while its 
qualitative characters are an effect of “condensation.” 
Science is only the elaboration and refinement of this 
same tendency, already manifested in perception and 
in common-sense. The most exact sciences, such as 
physics, mathematics, and logic, are not, as is com- 
monly supposed, the most theoretical, the most purely 
cognitive; but, on the contrary, are the most conven- 
tional, schematic, and therefore practical. The intellect 
reaches the acme of artificiality and of utility in con- 
ceptual thinking. “To try to fit a concept on an object 
is simply to ask what we can do with the object, and 
what it can do with us. To label a certain object with 
a certain concept is to mark in precise terms the kind 
of action or attitude the object should suggest to us.” ! 
The intellectualized object is reality reduced to the ut- 
most passivity, while the intellectualizing of it is reality 
raised to the highest activity. The activity of the sub- 
ject and that of the object are thus inversely propor- 
tional. 

Reality is to be known as it is only by “‘intuition’’; 

1 Introduction to Metaphysics, English trans., p. 41. 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 179 


and to obtain this metaphysical insight it is necessary 
to recognize and discount the bias of our practical needs. 
“By unmaking that which these needs have made, we 
may restore to intuition its original purity and so re- 
cover contact with the real.’”’ As regards our own inner 
life and freedom, instead of objectifying ourselves and 
so bringing ourselves under the spatializing, decompos- 
ing, and deterministic categories of science, we can, by 
changing the point of view, become immediately aware 
of that “duration wherein we act” (durée réele) and 
wherein “our states melt into each other.” ! We may 
obtain a similar immediate knowledge or intuition of 
material reality by relaxing the tension of practical ef- 
fort, and restoring the wealth of content which our 
practical effort has contracted into instantaneous and 
‘abbreviated summaries. Then the qualities of percep- 
tion dissolve into a myriad of little movements, and the 
minor differences which were negligible for practical 
purposes emerge again in all their multiplicity. The 
homogeneous and static space becomes a plenum of 
movement, a ‘‘concrete extension, continuous, diversi- 
fied, and at the same time organized.” ? 

It is evident that the dualism of intellect and intui- 
tion is by no means unreconciled. In the first place, 
while the intellect falsifies reality in the interest of prac- 
tice, it does so not by fabrication, but by selection. Of 
the lower or purely material aspect of nature it renders 
an approximately adequate account, and even in the 
sphere of life and mind it fails through insufficiency or 


1 Matter and Memory, English trans., pp. 241, 243-244. 
2 Ibid., pp. 241, 243, 244. 


180 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


partiality, rather than through any absolute contrariety 
to fact. Intellect does not create out of whole cloth, but 
isolates, arrests, and over-simplifies, through dwelling 
exclusively on something which zs there, but which is 
only a small fragment of what is there. Furthermore, 
it has to be recognized that this very falsification is 
achieved in the interest of practice. Intellect is an in- 
dispensable adjunct of life where, as in man, this reaches 
the highest degree of emancipation from matter. When 
thought is construed as a plan of action, science be- 
comes an infinite multiplication of the possibilities of 
action, which, through its very extension of the range 
of determination in the object, increases the indetermi- 
nateness or freedom of the agent. 

As Bergson’s cognitive dualism is reconciled through 
conceiving intellect in terms of selection and the re- 
quirements of action, so his metaphysical dualism is 
reconciled through conceiving life and matter as only 
the inverse and complementary aspects of the same 
process, the one being its ‘“‘making”’ and the other its 
“wnmaking.” Reality is movement or activity which 
has different degrees of intensity, and two opposite 
tendencies.! Positively it tends to be gathered all at 
once into a moment of creation, or focussed to a point 
of pure activity; negatively it tends to relax and dis- 
solve, and thus to become more repetitive, homogene- 
ous, and stagnant.? 

The course of natural evolution with its upward ten- 


1 Or can the opposition be reduced to the difference of intensity, so 
that matter becomes a sort of tide-rip marking the projection of the 
more sluggish upon the livelier current? 

2 Cf. Introduction to Metaphysics, English trans., pp. 62-64. 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 181 


dency and its essential sameness amidst diversity of 
forms, can be understood only as one original vital im- 
pulse (élan vital), which has to overcome resistance, and 
divides itself to conquer. Life is everywhere endeavor- 
ing to maintain and increase itself amidst the drag and 
inertia of materiality. When it succumbs it lapses into 
mechanism, as in the case of habit. Its first victory is 
the accumulation and storage of energies which can be 
explosively released. This is the achievement of plant 
life. Profiting by this achievement, animal or mobile 
life diverges in two directions, culminating in the “‘in- 
stinct”’ of the arthropods and the “‘intelligence”’ of the 
vertebrates. Instinct is capacity to deal directly and 
infallibly with the object, an adaptation of the organism 
itself to its immediate environment. Intelligence is a 
capacity to deal indirectly and experimentally with the 
object by the fabrication and use of mechanical tools, 
which are external both to the organism and to the 
object on which it acts. Instinct enters sympathetically 
into the inner nature of the object, or goes to the heart 
of it by penetrating insight, but its variability and its 
range are narrow. Intelligence remains outside the ob- 
ject, but through the very externality of its methods it 
is enabled to extend its action widely, and to construct 
its own world by a limitless conjoining of one mecha- 
nism with another. Instinct tends to be unconscious 
through the fact that its knowledge is a perfect adap- 
tation, translated instantly into action: its knowledge 
consists in a capacity to do the right thing in the given 
circumstances. Intellect, on the other hand, has more 
projects than it can fulfil; and it is just this multiplica- 


182 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


tion of possibilities which makes human life so highly, 
conscious and so unpredictable. 

The value of life lies in its intensity and activity; 
and here again the duality of life and matter is softened 
by the reflection that effort would be impossible with- 
out matter. “By the resistance matter offers and by 
the docility with which we endow it, it is at one and 
the same time obstacle, instrument, and stimulus.” ! 
Matter also divides spirit, and individuates it, thus set- 
ting the task of the achievement and growth of person- 
ality. But Bergson, unlike Nietzsche, never loses sight 
of the unzty of life. There appears to have been ‘‘some 
original and essential aspiration of life which could find 
full satisfaction only in society.” “It 1s the moral man 
who is a creator in the highest degree—the man whose 
action, itself intense, is also capable of intensifying the 
action of other men, and, itself generous, can kindle 
fires on the hearths of generosity.”’ ? Bergson’s religious 
Imagination is fired by the same idea. With this doc- 
trine of life as a single immense wave spreading out- 
ward from the same centre, ‘‘ we feel ourselves no longer 
isolated in humanity, humanity no longer seems iso- 
lated in the nature that it dominates. ... All the 
living hold together, and all yield together to the same — 
push.” God is this central radiation of life. ‘God thus 
defined, has nothing of the already made: He is un- 
ceasing life, action, freedom.” 3 


1 Mind-Energy, English trans., p. 29. 
2 Iind., pp. 32-34. 
3 Creative Evolution, English trans., pp. 265-266, 270-271, 248. 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 183 


§ 24. Catholic Modernism. Le Roy 


There are two general movements which are asso- 
ciated with the influence of Bergson and with allied ten- 
dencies in French thought, philosophical syndicalism, 
and Catholic modernism. The former advocates social 
revolution as an expression and cult of the heroic will.! 
The latter attempts a reconciliation of the Catholic 
faith with modern science and biblical criticism, through 
a pragmatic, voluntaristic, or activistic interpretation 
of religious truth. The underlying philosophy of mod- 
ernism appears in the thought of Epovarp Lz Roy,? 
who succeeded Bergson at the Collége de France, and 
combined the latter’s philosophy with that of Poincaré. 
Extending Poincaré’s idea of the conventionality of sci- 
entific theories* to science as a whole, both in its logical 
and in its empirical aspects, he finds that things, laws, 
and concepts, all alike, exist only by definition. The 


1The most prominent representative of this movement is Georges 
Sorel (1847-1922). Cf. his Réflerions sur-la Violence, 1909 (English 
trans., 1912). 

2 Le Roy was born in 1870. His most important writings are: ‘‘Science 
et Philosophie,’’ Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. VII, 1899; 
“Le probléme de Dieu,” ibid., vol. XV, 1907; Dogme et Critique, 1907. 

A prior and not less eminent philosophical protagonist of modernism 
is M. Blondel (§ 23). Among its influential leaders were: Antonio Fo- 
gazzaro (1842-1911; Jl Santo, 1905; English trans., T’he Saint, 1906); 
Friedrich von Hiigel (1852-1925; Catholic Mysticism, 1914); George 
Tyrrell (1861-1909; Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 1910); Romolo 


Murri (1870- , the leader of the Christian Democratic move- 
ment in Italy, and author of La Croce e la Spada, 1915); and Alfred 
Loisy (1857- , the most powerful champion of the cause, and 


author of numerous works in biblical history and criticism, and of 
modernist tracts; cf. his L’Hvangile et l Eglise, 1902, and the autobio- 
graphical work trans. into English as My Struggle with the Vatican, 
1924). 

*§ 11. 


184 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


work of the intellect, even the carving of facts out of 
the continuum of the given, is to be construed as a self- 
expression of life. What this life is in its depths is 
known by intuition, and, above all, in the religious ex- 
perience. The dogmas of Christianity are to be con- 
strued not as theorems, intellectually demonstrable, but 
as rules of action. Thus ‘God is a person” means 
“treat God as a person.” Only when dogmas are so 
conceived is it possible to understand how they should 
be imposed by authority, and how they should obtain 
meaning in terms of the religious life. 

Modernism was anathematized and, as a Catholic 
movement, effectually suppressed by the famous En- 
cyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, issued by Pope Pius X 
in 1907.1 While this document is polemical and harsh 
in tone, it brings clearly to light the issue between mod- 
ernism and the traditional philosophy of Catholicism. 
Modernism attempted to reconcile devoted adherence 
to the Church as an historic institution and community 
of worship with entire freedom of scientific research 
and opinion, and with the spirit of progressivism. This 
reconciliation was to be effected by an emphasis upon 
the religious experience, as constituting both the heart 
of religion and the evidence of its truth. The modern- 
ists were? distinctively Catholic, rather than Protestant, 
in the spirit of their piety—in their mystical sense of 
corporate solidarity and union with the past, and in 
their faith in the transforming power of love. They 

1 English versions of this Encyclical may be found in G. Tyrrell, The 
Programme of Modernism, 1908; and P. Sabatier, Modernism, 1908. 


2 One speaks of living modernists in the past tense because they are 
now either excommunicated, silenced, or “indexed.” 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 185 


were men of eminent Christian spirituality. On the 
other hand, however, they allied themselves unquali- 
fiedly with modern methods in all fields of inquiry. In 
order to reconcile these two positions they adopted a 
theory of knowledge entirely at variance with the Cath- 
clic intellectual tradition. They were obliged so to con- 
ceive the truths of faith as to render them consistent 
with any results to which free investigation might lead, 
in church history, biblical criticism, or cosmology. The 
truths of faith, they taught, are such as can be appre- 
hended only by faith, being an expression of the inner 
needs of the soul, and verified by their quickening effect 
upon the will. Their value lies not in their reproduction 
of facts, but in their power to enhance the religious life. 
The words and concepts in which they are formulated 
are not descriptions, but symbols, and they must from 
time to time be reworded and reconceived if they are 
to preserve their power over the hearts of men. Truths 
of this sort cannot contradict the findings of science, 
because they belong to another sphere; nor, on the 
other hand, can they be disparaged by science, since 
science itself is also the expression of other and less 
central needs. 

It is not surprising that the writer of the Encyclical 
should have accused modernists of ‘‘subjectivism”’ and 
“agnosticism,” since they denied the power of the in- 
tellect to lay hold on the reality beyond phenomena; 
of substituting the immediate intuitions of an “in- 
terior sense”’ for the proofs of natural theology and for 
authentic revelation; of substituting ‘“‘fideism”’ for ra- 
tionalism; of converting the realities of Christian belief 


186 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


into fictions, symbols, and instruments; of making all 
religious truth relative and transitory, and all religions 
equally true; of saving religion from science by making 
it unscientific. Judged by the ‘Catholic principles” 
embodied in the scholastic philosophy, modernism is 
thus a “synthesis of all the heresies,’ being in direct 
opposition to the claim that Christian belief rests upon 
a foundation of objective knowledge firmly and incon- 
trovertibly established by reason.' 


§25. Pragmatism and the Will to Believe. James. 
Peirce. Dewey. Schiller. Vaihinger 


The difference between Bergson and WILLIAM JAMES 
is the difference between a psychological biology and a 
biological psychology. Both oppose materialism and 
mechanism in that they find the centre of reality in the 
field of life and mind, and both oppose spiritualism of 
the traditional type in that they interpret life and mind 
in terms of their observed or felt existence, rather than 
in terms of their standards or “norms.” Both might be 
described by such phrases as “‘naturalistic spiritualism” 
or “‘spiritualistic naturalism.” Both, furthermore, tend 
to reduce life and mind to common terms. The differ- 
ence is that while for Bergson these common terms re- 
tain a stronger flavor of life, for James they retain a 
stronger flavor of mind. For Bergson’s reality the most 
adequate term is ‘“‘activity’’; for James’s, “experience.” 

This difference arises, on the part of James, from the 


1 The Encyclical Pascendi both suppressed modernism and prescribed 
scholasticism: ‘‘We will and strictly ordain that scholastic philosophy 
be made the basis of the sacred sciences.” P. Sabatier, op. cit., p. 325. 
Cf. below, § 27. 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 187 


influence of the British empirical school, in which he 
takes his place in the line of succession after Hume and 
Mill; and from his lifelong preoccupation with psychol- 
ogy. This latter bent sprang both from the psychologi- 
cal emphasis of British empiricism and from his own 
early training in the biological sciences. Born in 1842, 
and originally a student of anatomy, chemistry, and 
medicine, his scientific interest was deepened by his 
contact with Louis Agassiz. In experimental and phys- 
iological psychology he found a fruitful contact be- 
tween the scientific method and the larger human 
problems. Through his wide reading and culture, and 
owing to a profound antipathy to what he took to be 
the dogmatic negations of science, his philosophical in- 
terests took root early in his career and never ceased 
to dominate him; but it was through his contributions \ 
to psychology that they found their first important ex- > 
pression. The Principles of Psychology, his greatest 

work, and of epoch-making importance in the history 
of this science, appeared in 1890. The volume of essays 
entitled The Will to Belceve, published in 1897, brought 
more clearly to light the broad philosophical implica- 
tions of his psychology. His theory of truth was pub- 
lished under the title of Pragmatism in 1907, and gave 
its name to the school of which he was now the ac- 
cepted leader. The Varieties of Religious Experience 
(1902) and A Pluralistic Universe (1909) contained his 
speculations in the field of religion and metaphysics.” 


1§ 5. 

Among the more important of his other philosophical writings are: 
The Meaning of Truth, 1909; and the posthumous publications, Some 
Problems of Philosophy, 1911, and Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912. 


188 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


From 1880 until 1907, three years before his death in 
1910, James was a teacher of psychology and philosophy 
at Harvard University. His numerous contacts with 
’ European scholars, his cosmopolitan outlook and cast 
of mind, and his extreme versatility combined to spread 
his influence more widely than that of any other 
American thinker of his day. 

James’s psychology contains, over and above a wealth 
of empirical detail, two central ideas that governed his 
~ lJater philosophical thought. Although disposed to con- 
strue consciousness, after the manner of the British 
tradition, as a manifold of distinguishable states trace- 
able to sense-experience, he insisted upon its activity and 
unity. The activity of consciousness is selective, inter- 
ested, teleological. It attends to this or that within a 
“theatre of simultaneous possibilities,’ and thus 
“carves out” its own world from “the jointless con- 
tinuity of space and moving clouds of swarming 
atoms.” ! Especially is this true of the higher faculties 
of will and intellect, of which the former, by dwelling 
upon one idea to the exclusion of others, causes it to 
fill the mind and thus to express itself in outward ac- 
tion; while the latter isolates and integrates “things,” 
imputes reality to them in so far as they are related ‘“‘to 
our emotional and active life,’ and conceives them un- 
der whatever aspect may prove most significant and 
fruitful.2 The unity of consciousness consists in its 
through and through connectedness. It is a flowing 
stream, of which the ‘‘substantive” parts shade into 


1 Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 288-289. 
2 Op. cit., vol. II, p. 295; ch. XIX, XXI, XXII, XXVI. 


me VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 189 


one another through the “transitive” parts, and in 
which every object is surrounded by a “fringe,” or ac- 
companied by a “feeling of tendency” through which 
it passes over into another.! 

James’s theory of knowledge was developed from this 
psychological standpoint, and is throughout dominated 
by its two main characteristics: its emphasis on the 
categories of interest and practice; and its reduction of 
relations, substances, activities, and other alleged tran- 
scendent elements to the continuities of sense-experi- 
ence. The former motive in James’s thought led to his 
voluntarism and pragmatism, the latter to his “radical 
empiricism.” 

James attributed his pragmatic theory of knowledge 
and its name to CHARLES 8. Perrcn,? an American 
scholar of great erudition and originality, who distin- 
guished himself in physics as well as in philosophy, and 
was one of the founders of “symbolic logic.”” According 
to Peirce, conceptions are to be interpreted in experi- 
mental terms. The conception of any given object con- 
sists of the effects to be anticipated of the object, and 


1QOp. cit., vol. I, ch. IX. 

21839-1914. Peirce did not accept James’s theory of truth, but held 
that truth consists essentially in the agreement of experts—insisting, as 
scientist and logician, upon the importance of technic. Other striking 
features of his thought, which influenced Royce as well as James, were 
his theory of the evolution of natural laws, his theory of the objective 
reality of chance, and his theory of ‘‘signs.’”? The cosmos assumed for 
him the aspect of the gradual development of a rational order out of 
chaos. Some of his scattered writings were published in 1923, under 
the title of Chance, Love, and Logic. The article to which James referred 
as the original source of pragmatism was entitled ‘‘How to Make Our 
Ideas Clear,’”’ and appeared in Popular Science Monthly in 1878. James’s 
reference to Peirce is in Pragmatism, p. 46. Cf. also “‘What Pragmatism 
Is?” Monist, vol. XV, 1905. For a bibliography of Peirce’s numerous 
papers, cf. Jour. of Philos., vol. XIII, 1916, pp. 733 ff. 


190 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


these effects, in turn, are to be construed as sensible 
effects; that is, effects which would have to be taken 
account of in practice. The conception is thus a general 
. plan of action, or system of expectations, with refer- 
ence to an object. 

James takes this view as his point of departure, and 
develops what he believes to be its implications. There 
are two sorts of knowledge—knowledge by acquaintance 
and knowledge about. In the former the object is im- 
mediately presented, in the latter it is known mediately, 
or by means of ideas. The function of the idea in 
knowledge is not to reproduce the object, but to pre- 
pare for or lead the way to it. Pragmatism consists, in 
the first place, in the ‘“‘method”’ which interprets our 
idea of an object as ‘what conceivable effects of a prac- 
tical kind the object may involve—what sensations we 
are to expect from it, and what reactions we must pre- 
pare.”! In other words, the meaning of an idea looks 
forward to consequences, rather than, as with the tra- 
ditional empiricism, backward to its sensory original. 
The truth of an idea, will therefore consist in the ulterior 
satisfaction which it affords, either through the fulfil- 
ment of the sensory expectation or the success of the 
reaction. But since we form expectations only for the 
purposes of action, their fulfilment is only an incident 
of practical success, and we may say of truth as a whole 
that it consists in the utility or ‘‘working”’ of ideas; or 
that “the true . . . is only the expedient in our way 
of thinking.” ? The value of having expectations ful- 
filled lies in its enabling us to deal with the existing sit- 

1 Pragmatism, pp. 46-47. 2 Jind., p. 222. 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 191 


uation; so that the final justification of all ideas, like 
their meaning, is to be found, not in their logical struc- 
ture or in their origin, but in the service which they 
render to the will. It is the will which accounts for our 
having ideas at all, and it is the will to which in the 
last analysis they are accountable. 

This being the case, moral or esthetic demands may 
properly be decisive where ideas are not verifiable in 
the limited sense of the fulfilment of sensory expecta- 
tions. This is James’s famous doctrine of the ‘‘will to 
believe,” in which, following Renouvier, he argues 
against the scruples of positivists such as Clifford.! 
Since science itself arises in response to practical de- 
mands, it cannot overrule such demands. It is impossi- 
ble to avoid extra-empirical beliefs, for the very omis- 
sion of them is equivalent to their negation. He who 
from scientific scruples declines to believe in God is in 
effect dzs-believing in God; and sense-experience does 
not support the negation any more than it supports the 
affirmation. Since one cannot remain non-committal— 
since, in other words, there is a “forced option,’’ “our 
passional nature not only lawfully may, but must de- 
cide.” ? 

James’s doctrine of ‘‘radical empiricism”’ is closely 
related to the ‘“‘phenomenism”’ of Renouvier. It means 
not only that reality in order to be “debatable”’ at all 
shall be definable in terms drawn from experience,” but 
that experience is coherent and self-sufficient 7n ts own 
terms. It does not mean that knowledge is to be limited 
to the boundaries of actual experience, but that it shall 


1§ 4. | 2 Will to Believe, p. 11. 


192 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


not employ any categories save those that are exempli- 
fied in experience. There is no need of invoking any 
non-empirical type of unity, such as a transcendent 
substance, or a pure activity, or an a priorz synthetic 
consciousness, since experience contains its own bonds, 
in the shape of ‘conjunctive relations,” which “are just 
as much matters of direct particular experience, neither 
more so nor less so, than the things themselves.” ! The 
most remarkable application of this thesis is to con- 
sciousness itself, which is not an entity outside its own 
experience, but only one type of conjunctive relation 
among these experiences. ‘The same identical terms of 
“pure experience” taken in one (the causal or energetic) 
type of relationship constitute “the system of external 
realities,’ while taken in another type of relationship 
they constitute “the stream of our internal thinking.” ? 

James’s metaphysics, like his theory of knowledge, 
has both its empirical and its practical mode of ap- 
proach. Empirically we must take reality to be just 
what it seems to be, as it is given to us in direct ac- 
quaintance: “that distributed and strung-along and 
flowing sort of reality which we finite beings swim in.” ® 
Its most characteristic features are those which the 
ordinary logic rejects. ‘‘How can what is manifold be 
one? how can things get out of themselves? how be 
their own others? how be both distinct and connected ? 
how can they act on one another? how be for others 
and yet for themselves? how be absent and present 


1 Meaning of Truth, pp. xii, xiii. 
2 Hssays in Radical Empiricism, p. 22. Cf. Mach, § 11. 
8 Pluralistic Universe, p. 213. 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 193 


at once?” ! Such logical difficulties are, however, cre- 
ated by that very intellectualism which is baffled by 
them. For intellect deals with things by abstraction 
and then proceeds as though there were nothing to the 
thing but what is abstracted. The solution lies not in 
making more abstractions, but in a return to the origi- 
nal concreteness, where these artificial difficulties do not 
occur. 

It was in this appeal from the self-limiting and self- 
defeating processes of the intellect to the illumination 
of intuitive immediacy that James found himself con- 
firmed by Bergson.? It enabled him not only to adhere 
to the empirical standpoint in metaphysics, or to iden- 
tify reality with experience, but also to accept as a 
probable hypothesis Fechner’s doctrine of a superhuman 
consciousness, compounded of the experiences of human 
and infra-human minds. This hypothesis acquires 
plausibility from the “abnormal or super-normal phe- 
nomena” of multiple personality, automatic writing, 
and mediumship; but above all from the religious expe- 
rience, with its conviction “that we inhabit an invisible 
spiritual environment from which help comes, our soul 
being mysteriously one with a larger soul whose instru- 
ments we are.” 4 The mystical intuition would then be 
“only very sudden and great extensions of the ordinary 
‘field of consciousness,’’’—‘‘an immense spreading of 
the margin of the field.’ 


1 Pluralistic Universe, p. 260. 2 Tbid., Lect. VI. $§ 14. 
4 Ibid., pp. 298-299, 308-309. Cf. Varieties of Religious Experience, 
Lect. XX. 


5 Collected Essays and Reviews, 1920, p. 500. 


194 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


In this sense a metaphysics which is pluralistic and 
yet religious obtains a certain “direct empirical verifi- 
cation.” ! But this same view is supported also by the 
demands of the moral and emotional life. Theism is 
“the most practically rational solution it is possible to 
conceive.” For there is “not an energy of our active 
nature of which it does not normally and naturally re- 
lease the springs. At a single stroke it changes the dead, 
blank zt of the world into a living thou, with whom the 
whole man may have dealings.” 2. Only the supposition 
of a finite God of limited responsibility, and an unde- 
termined world, in which what ought to be is genuinely 
possible, can make the existence of evil tolerable to the 
moral will.? Only the sense of being under God a “ faith- 
ful fighter”’ in the cause of righteousness, together with 
faith in an ultimate victory to which one will oneself 
have furnished a genuine contribution, can make “‘life 
worth living.” 4 Thus the pragmatic theory of knowl- 
edge and the empirical-pluralistic metaphysics converge 
in a militant moralism and theistic faith. 


After James the most distinguished American rep- 
resentative of the vitalistic, voluntaristic, pragmatic 
school is Joun DEwey.® His philosophy is commonly 


1 Pluralistic Universe, p. 308. 2 Will to Believe, p. 127. 

8 Tbid., essay on “The Dilemma of Determinism.” 

4 Thid., essay on “Is Life Worth Living?”’ 

5 Born 1859. Cf. his Studies in Logical Theory, 1903; Essays on Ex- 
perimental Logic, 1916; Democracy and Education, 1916; Experience and 
Nature, 1925. For Dewey’s relation to Darwinism, cf. his Influence of 
Darwin on Philosophy, 1910; and above, § 6. Among American philoso- 
phers who are classed as Dewey’s collaborators or followers are: James 
H. Tufts (Ethics, 1908); George H. Mead (“‘ Definition of the Psychical,” 


VITALISM AND PRAGMATISM 195 


referred to as “‘instrumentalism,” in so far as it affirms 
that cognition consists in forging ideal tools or instru- 
ments by which to cope with a given situation in which 
activity has been thwarted. Ideas are plastic and adap- 
tive, and, like new organs, they owe their survival and 
stability to the vital functions which they serve. Dew- 
ey’s thought is distinguished by its emphasis on social 
philosophy and progress, thought consisting in the per- 
petual reconstruction of ends or purposes by which the 
life of the group is liberalized and expanded. 

In England the leading exponent of this school is 
F. C. 8. Scuitier.' He calls this philosophy ‘‘human- 
ism,” in order to emphasize the dependence of knowl- 
edge and truth on human nature and on the moral and 
religious demands. His emphasis on the creative and 
authoritative réle of the concrete individual gives him 
a certain affinity with “personal idealism.” 

In Germany Hans VAIHINGHR? has emphasized the 
biological and economic nature of thought, and con- 
strued the concepts of science, ethics, jurisprudence, 
and religion as useful “fictions.” It is convenient or 
fruitful to treat objects “as if” they were what in fact 
and in logic they are not. In such a view, Vaihinger 
believes that he reconciles the claims of both positiv- 
ism and idealism: of positivism, because the data of 


Univ. of Chicago Decennial Publications, 1903); Addison W. Moore 
(Pragmatism and Its Critics, 1910); and H. W. Stuart. Cf. Studies in 
Logical Theory, and a co-operative volume entitled Creative Intelligence, 
1917. 

1 Born 1864. Cf. his Riddles of the Sphinx, 1891; Humanism, 1903; 
Studies in Humanism, 1907. For “‘personal idealism” cf. § 18. 

2 Born 1852. Cf. his Philosophie der Als Ob, 1911 (English trans., The 
Philosophy of “‘As If,” 1924). 


196 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


sense-perception are taken as the point of departure 
and the test of truth; of idealism, because provision is 
made for the traditional ‘“values”’ and for their effi- 
cacy in life. 


PART V 
THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 


§ 26. The Reaction against Idealism 


The term ‘idealism’ is used in modern philosophy 
to indicate the view that to be and to be known are 
one and the same;' or that the act by which anything 
comes into mind is the same as the act by which it 
comes into being. ‘‘ Realism,” as the opposite to this 
view, will then mean that some or all known objects 
owe their being to conditions different from those to 
which they owe their being known; or that it is possible 
that objects should be without being known. It is evi- 
dent that one may take either the idealistic or the real- 
istic view of all objects, and thus be pan-idealistic or 
pan-realistic; or that one may take the idealistic view 
of some objects, and the realistic view of others. In 
the latter case, one may stress either the real or the 
ideal objects as being the more fundamental. 

During the nineteenth century half-realisms were 
very common, but they had great difficulty in main- 
taining themselves because of an inherent drift toward 
idealism. Thus materialism, for example, was idealistic 
as regards the content of both sense-perception and 
thought, since the former was conceived as the effect 
on the mind or sentient organism of external physical 
stimuli, and the latter as a secondary and still more 


1 The term ‘‘known”’ is here used broadly to signify any act or state 
of consciousness that has an object. Thus to be known means to be 
sensed, perceived, felt, judged, thought, willed, etc. 

197 


198 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


subjective reproduction of sense-perception. Sense- 
qualities and ideas were thus conceived as owing their 
existence and nature to the same causal act which 
brought them into consciousness. The original physical 
cause itself, on the other hand, was supposed to exist 
independently of being known, and was regarded as the 
more fundamental reality. But a double difficulty arose. 
All sense-qualities and ideas being construed as subjec- 
tive effects, there was nothing left in terms of which to 
characterize the alleged external object; and there being 
no specified act of knowledge which did not create its 
own content, it was inconceivable that one should even 
know that there was such an object. The external ob- 
ject was reduced to an zx, of which one could know 
neither what it was nor that it was. 

Spiritualism, also, was commonly idealistic as regards 
both sense-perception and thought; and also, like ma- 
terialism, held a realistic view of the world lying be- 
yond them. But spiritualism introduced a new type of 
content in terms of which to characterize this outlying 
reality, a content derived from the immediate self-ex- 
perience of the subject, or what the knowing mind is to 
itself. This content, however, must be construed ideal- 
istically, since it 7s the very character of being to or for 
itself. By what act, then, is this character ascribed by 
any human self to another self, human or divine? If by 
perception or thought, as these are employed in the ar- 
gument from analogy, then the other self is annexed 
to the knowing self; for sense-qualities belong to the 
subject that perceives them, and ideas to the subject 
that thinks them. There remains only the supposition 


THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 199 


of a kind of sympathetic insight, in which the knower 
projects himself into the known, and grasps it as it is 
to itself. In other words, one knows the other self by 
becoming the other self. But in that case the other self 
ceases to be another self, and one is reduced again to the 
case of the immediate experience of the active self, in 
which being and being known are one and the same thing. 

Thus the realisms of the nineteenth century tended 
to gravitate toward idealism of one or the other of two 
types: either of the relatively intellectual type, in which 
reality is the organization of sense-perception by 
thought; or of the relatively irrational type, in which 
reality is the pure activity of spirit. Of these types the 
former tended to prevail over the latter because it em- 
braced both experience and logic, while the latter rested 
its case on a more elusive and doubtful intuition. 

The first two decades of the twentieth century have 
witnessed a wide-spread reaction against this victorious 
idealism, and the revival of realism in a more circum- 
spect and stable form. This new movement is yet in its 
beginnings, and embraces a wide diversity of doctrine. 
Its unity, apart from its common polemic against ideal- 
ism, lies in its endeavor to escape the essential weakness 
of the earlier realism. This weakness lay in its virtually 
abandoning its case at the outset in conceding the ideal- 
istic interpretation of sense-perception, or of thought, 
or of both. Instead of construing sense-perception as 
an effect induced in the mind by the action of external 
objects, and capable, therefore, of revealing only the 
momentary state of the mind itself, the newer realism 
construes sense-perception as an act in which the exist- 


200 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


ent object is given or disclosed. Instead of construing 
thought as a creative activity, in which the laws of the 
mind itself are exhibited and expressed, the newer real- 
ism construes thought as an act which refers to or intends 
objects of a non-existent or subsistent realm, such as 
logical entities or relations. There is thus in the current 
realistic theory of knowledge a general insistence that 
knowledge is a way of taking rather than of making ob- 
jects; and there is a division or alternation of emphasis 
between empirical, existent objects, and logical, non- 
existent objects. 

The reaction against idealism was due to causes lying 
both within and without the sphere of philosophy itself. 
In spite of the current toward idealism in the second 
half of the nineteenth century, the realistic way of 
thinking had never ceased to have its living exponents, 
as well as its exemplars among the great philosophers 
of the past. The realism of the ancients, notably of 
Aristotle, had been embodied in the systems of Thomas 
Aquinas and other medizval scholastics, and be- 
queathed to posterity under the patronage of the Cath- 
olic Church. It was always possible to make a realist 
of Kant, by giving a positive and yet transcendent in- 
terpretation to his conception of the “‘thing-in-itself.” 1 
Toward the close of the nineteenth century the position 
of idealism was weakened by the vigorous assaults of 
its naturalistic and pragmatic exponents, and its argu- 
ments ceased to exercise a spell upon the minds of 
younger thinkers. Meanwhile the new realism, like 
older realisms, derived a powerful appeal from its agree- 

1Cf., e. g., Kiilpe, § 28. 


THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 201 


ment with common-sense and with the bias of science. 
The human mind is instinctively and habitually realis- 
tic, so that realism does not so much need to be proved 
as to be defended against criticism. 


§ 27. Neo-Thomism 


Among the realistic movements of recent philosophy 
that which is most deeply rooted in the past is the 
philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, modernized and re- 
stored to its former eminence as the official philosophy 
of the Catholic Church. While Roman Catholic think- 
ers were to be found among all the major schools of 
philosophy that flourished in the nineteenth century, 
there were two movements which were peculiarly iden- 
tified with the effort to furnish a philosophical founda- 
tion for the doctrine of the Church. The one of these 
was the movement known as “modernism,”’ which was 
allied with pragmatism, and especially with the thought 
of Bergson. This was both preceded and succeeded by 
the more wide-spread and lasting movement known as 
“‘neo-scholasticism’”’ or ‘“‘neo-Thomism.”’ 

The great scholastic systems which dominated the 
thought of Catholic Europe in the thirteenth century 
rapidly declined in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
and thereafter for three hundred years were represented 
only intermittently by men of eminence such as Suarez 
(1548-1617) and Bossuet (1627-1704). They reached 
their lowest ebb at the close of the eighteenth century, 
at which time there could not be said to be any distinc- 
tively Catholic philosophy. During the first half of the 

1Cf. § 24. 


202 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


nineteenth century unsuccessful attempts to establish 
such a philosophy were made by the “traditionalists” 4 
in France, by Rosmini in Italy,? and by idealists of the 
Kantian and Hegelian school. The persistent demand 
for a philosophy which should furnish a basis and frame 
for Catholic faith, or provide those truths of reason 
which should be the fitting complement of the truths of 
revelation, finally brought about a return to the classic 
Catholic philosophy formulated in the Summa Theolo- 
gie of St. Thomas.’ 

The Encyclical Aterni Patris, issued by Pope Leo 
XIII in 1879, contained the words: “We earnestly ex- 
hort you all, Venerable Brethren, for the defense and 
adornment of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, 
for the advancement of all sciences, to restore the 
golden wisdom of St. Thomas and propagate it far and 
wide to the best of your power.” 4 This papal exhorta- 
tion was obediently and zealously complied with. But 
while some Catholic thinkers such as Sanseverino® took 
the exhortation to mean a return to the letter of St. 
Thomas, and a scornful rejection of modern thought, 
the Encyclical expressly emphasized the wisdom of St. 
Thomas, to the exclusion of “any excessive subtlety of 
inquiry, any inconsiderate teaching, anything less con- 
sistent with the ascertained conclusions of a later gen- 
eration; in a word, anything in any way improbable.” 
Neo-Thomism thus came to mean, first, a purification of 

1 § 3. 2§ 2. 

3 While this revival was due chiefly to the need felt in Catholic circles 
for a solid philosophical substructure, it was stimulated by the interest 
in medieval studies awakened by the Romantic movement, notably by 
Fr. Schlegel (1722-1829), Cousin (§ 15), and others. 


4Quoted by J. Rickaby, Scholasticism, 1908, pp. 88-89. 
6§ 2. 


THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 203 


Thomist doctrines, second, such amendment of them as 
might be required by the advances of science, and, 
third, their reformulation in terms calculated to con- 
vince a modern mind. . 

The first part of this programme has led to a pro- 
found study, employing modern methods of historical 
scholarship, not only of Thomism but of the whole 
scholastic epoch.! The other two parts of the pro- 
gramme have led to the study of modern science and 
philosophy, a restatement and extension of Thomist 
principles, and their adaptation to the method and 
problems of contemporary philosophical inquiry. There 
have been three prominent centres of interest in sys- 
tematic neo-Thomism: the Seminary of St. Sulpice in 
Paris,” the Institute of Philosophy, founded in 1871 as 
a branch of the University of Louvain, and achieving 
instant fame through the work of Drestr& Mercrer;? 
and the Jesuit College of Stonyhurst in England.* 


1 This historical branch of the movement is represented by the work 
of Cl. Baeumker and M. Grabmann in Germany, M. de Wulf in Belgium, 
and &. Gilson in France. 

2 Represented, for example, by Albert Farges, whose Hiudes philo- 
sophiques (1886-1907) offers a Thomist-Aristotelian interpretation of 
modern physics, mathematics, biology, physiology, and psychology. 

31851-1926; author of many standard works, both historical and 
systematic. Cf. his Sommaire du Cours de Philosophie selon Saint Thomas 
d’ Aquin, 1884-1890 (English trans., Manual of Modern Scholastic Phi- 
losophy, 1900). On becoming Cardinal he was succeeded at Louvain by 
M. de Wulf, whose Introduction a la Philosophie neo-scolastique was 
published in 1904 (English trans., 1907). 

4The most prominent representatives of this school are: Thomas 
Harper (1852-1893; Metaphysics of the Schools, 1879-1884); Joseph 
Rickaby (Moral Philosophy, 1889); Leslie J. Walker (Theories of Knowl- 
edge, 1910). The best-known American writers of the neo-scholastic 
school are Brother Azarias (1847-1893; Essays Philosophical, 1896); and 
William Turner (History of Philosophy, 1903). 

A more recent school, rapidly attaining prominence, is that of Milan, 
represented by A. Gemelli and F. Olgiati, and by the Rivista di filosofia 
neo-scolastica. This school attempts a compromise with idealism. 


204 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


The ‘“‘golden wisdom of St. Thomas,” freed of its 
excessive emphasis on syllogistic logic, its Ptolemaic 
astronomy and astrology, its doctrine of angels, and 
other unscientific or antiquated features, comprises the 
following doctrines: the reality of universals zn re, that 
is, as the ideal essences of existent substances; the in- 
terpretation of motion as the tendency of a thing to 
realize (actualize) its nature; the conception of substance 
as that which exists by itself; the distinction between 
“matter” and “form” as aspects of substances, ordi- 
narily inseparable; the conception of the soul as activ- 
ity, undecomposable and therefore immortal; the proofs 
of God as first and final cause of nature; a libertarian 
ethics, in which man is conceived to attain happiness 
by a realization of his essentially rational nature in the 
love of God as truth; and, finally, an intellectualistic 
and realistic epistemology. 

It is the scholastic theory of knowledge, with its meta- 
physical implications, which determines its orientation 
among the schools of recent and contemporary philoso- 
phy. Neo-scholasticism affirms that metaphysical opin- 
ion is inescapable, and that metaphysical knowledge is 
possible; hence its rejection of the sceptical, agnostic, 
and positivistic forms of naturalism. Metaphysical 
knowledge is possible through reasoned inferences from 
the facts of experience—hence the rejection of empiri- 
cism. The doctrine that the truth is one, universal and 
changing, whether it be truth of reason or the truth of 
revelation, leads the neo-scholastic to repudiate (as 
relativistic) every species of pragmatism, even when 
invoked in support of Christian dogma.’ Finally, the 

1 Cf. “Modernism,” above, § 24. 


THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 205 


neo-scholastic wages relentless war upon Kantianism, 
and upon all the varieties of idealistic metaphysics 
which have emanated from this source. To put a Kan- 
tian construction upon knowledge would mean that 
God and his thought of the world were one, whereas 
God is distinct from the world, which is his free crea- 
tion. A Kantian interpretation of knowledge would 
imply, furthermore, that the human mind in knowing 
the truth is united with the mind of God; whereas man, 
like nature, is a creation—in the image of God, but as 
a separate substance. Idealism leads to pantheism, and 
the only theory of knowledge consistent with theism is 
an epistemological dualism, in which the objects of 
knowledge, gua real, are “not affected by the fact of 
(their) becoming known’’; and in which the idea in the 
creative mind of God “reproduces itself in our mind 
through the instrumentality of the objects in which it 
is embodied.” ! In other words, there is inherent in the 
nature of the intellect a capacity to escape subjectivity, 
and to refer beyond the mind both to the real objects 
of nature and to their ulterior Cause. 


§ 28. Realism in Germany. Meinong. Husserl 


The most important of recent realistic movements in 
Germany? is that which was influenced by the psychol- 


1L. J. Walker, op. cit., pp. 48, 687. 

2 Realism of a different type is represented by O. Kiilpe (1862-1915), 
who developed experimental psychology in the direction of the study 
of the “thought-process.’’ Kiilpe’s realism consists essentially in an 
insistence on the transcendence of the object of knowledge. In relation 
to history and to other selves, knowledge must transcend both actual 
and possible experience, so that we have not explained and justified 
knowledge until we have accounted for the affirmation of a reality which 
is revealed through both sense and thought, but which lies beyond 
both. This problem Kiilpe undertook to solve in his unfinished work, 


206 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


ogist Franz BrentTANO,' who derived from his studies 
of Aristotle and scholasticism a view of mind as “‘in- 
tentional.”’ It is characteristic of psychical activity, 
according to this thinker, to be directed primarily upon 
objects, which may either exist or not exist; and only 
secondarily, in retrospect, upon itself. Atexrus MEI- 
NONG,’ student of Brentano at Vienna in 1874, and after 
1882 professor at the University of Graz, developed a 
branch of philosophical investigation which he called 
“theory of objects” (Gegenstandstheorie), which differs 
from psychology and theory of knowledge in abstracting 
from the relation to the empirical subject, and from 
metaphysics in transcending the realm of existence. 
“Object”? in this generalized sense includes not only 


Die Realisierung (1912-1920). His Einleitung in die Philosophie, 1895, 
has been translated into English (Introduction to Philosophy, 1897). Cf. 
also his Philosophie der Gegenwart in Deutschland, 1911 (English trans., 
The Philosophy of the Present in Germany, {1913). Other realists are: 
H. Volkelt (Hrfahrung und Denken, 1886; Gewissheit und Wahrheit, 
1918); and E. Becher (Naturphilosophie, 1914). 

Standing somewhat apart from the main currents of recent philoso- 
phy is Harald Hoffding (1843- ), the eminent Danish thinker. He 
terms his philosophy a ‘‘critical monism,’”’ meaning that while unity is 
the goal of thought, this goal is never attained, owing to the stubborn 
multiplicity and perpetual novelty of things. Hdéffding’s view may be 
termed “‘realistic’”’ in that thought is only a part of reality, which enables 
us to adapt ourselves to reality, but which cannot be proved to be 
typical of it. H6ffding’s most famous work is his Religionsphilosophie 
(1901; English trans., 1906), in which he defines religion as the belief 
in the conservation of values. Cf. also his Hihik, 1888; Philosophische 
Probleme, 1902 (English trans., with a Preface by W. James, 1905); Der 
Menschliche Gedanke, 1910. In all of his doctrines Héffding was pro- 
foundly influenced by Séren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the most impor- 
tant Scandinavian philosopher of the nineteenth century. 

11838-1917. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, 1874. 

2 1853-1920. Among his more important writings are the following: 
Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungen zur Wert-Theorie, 1894; Uber 
Annahmen, 1902, 1910; ‘Uber Gegenstandstheorie”’ in Untersuchungen 
zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie, 1904; Uber emotionale Prdsenta- 
tion, 1917; Zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Werttheorie, 1923. 


THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 207 


that which exists, like a physical thing, and that which 
merely “subsists” (Bestehen), such as qualities, num- 
bers, or propositions; but even that which, like the 
“round square,” can neither exist nor subsist, although 
it can be referred to and thought about. 

It is peculiarly characteristic of Meinong to distin- 
guish between judging (with conviction) and merely 
considering or “assuming”? (Annehmen); and to insist 
that even this latter act, tentative and non-committal 
as it is, nevertheless addresses itself to a peculiar kind 
of complex object, which can be verbally expressed only 
by a clause beginning with the conjunction “that.” 
Thus ‘‘a, white horse” is an object (Objekt) in the nar- 
rower sense of that which may be perceived, or of which 
I may form an idea; while “that the horse is white’’ is 
an “objective,” which can be an object (in the broader 
sense of Gegenstand) only when one judges or assumes 
“‘that”’ such is the case. Objects stand to one another, 
furthermore, in a relation of “superior’’ to “inferior,” 
or of higher to lower order, the former being ‘‘founded’’ 
upon or presupposing the latter, as “the difference be- 
tween red and green”’ presupposes “‘red”’ and “green.” 
Although the object of a mental act is “immanent,’’ in 
the sense of being within range of, or before, the mind, 
it has to be distinguished from the content (/nhalt), 
which is 7n the mind. This latter is always existent, 
present and psychical, like the mental act itself; while 
the object may be non-existent, past or future, or 
physical. 

Meinong has also been largely influential in securing 
recognition for a new branch of philosophy known as 


208 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


“theory of value,’”! which deals with the general prin- 
ciples applicable to all the senses in which things can 
be good or bad. His own peculiar doctrines appear in 
his view that value appertains only to “objectives”’; or 
is the content of feeling when this is mediated by judg- 
ments or assumptions. The measure of the value of 
an object is the pleasure and pain feit on the assump- 
tion of its existence or non-existence. This particular 
kind of objective, or what one feels should exist, he calls 
a “dignitative”’; just as he terms what one desires to 
exist, a “desiderative.”” Values have, in other words, 
that peculiar non-existent objectivity which is so basic a 
feature of Meinong’s whole philosophy. 


EDMUND HUSSERL,? like Meinong, was influenced by 
Brentano, and, like Meinong, he has formulated a new 
branch of philosophical investigation, which he calls 
“phenomenology” (Phéinomenologie). This is a descrip- 
tive study of consciousness, or (since it is essentially 
characteristic of consciousness to have objects), a study 
of consciousness-of-objects. It is distinguished from 
ordinary science, including psychology, by its attitude 
(Einstellung). This peculiar phenomenological attitude 
is contrasted with the primary or “‘natural’’ conscious 
act, which is directed upon the object and takes it to 


1Cf. also Ch. von Ehrenfels, System der Werttheorie, 1897. The most 
prominent American representative of this tendency, modified by the 
influence of Windelband and Rickert (§ 19), is W. M. Urban, Valuation, 
1909. 

? Born 1859. His principal work is his Logische Untersuchungen, origi- 
nally published in 1900-1901. His later views have appeared in revi- 
sions of this work (1913-1921) and in his Jdeen zu einer reinen Phainome- 
nologie und phinomenologischen Philosophie, 1914. He is professor at the 
University of Freiburg. 


THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 209 


be real. By reflection the naive, dogmatic attitude may 
be ‘“‘reduced,” or devitalized. One now no longer lives 
in the perceiving act, or views the object through it, nor 
does one (as in psychology) study the act in its natural 
environment; but one takes a detached position from 
which the object appears as simply the objective aspect 
of the act. It is like the difference between believing in 
God and thinking of myself as believing in God. In the 
latter case the belief is not asserted, but simply noted 
—God becoming only the objective component of the 
act. Phenomenology is thus purely descriptive in meth- 
od; is capable of perfect certainty, because it makes no 
claims beyond what is immanent in consciousness; and 
has universality because as dealing with the nature of 
objective reference in general it holds of all objective 
experiences in particular, whether theoretical or prac- 
tical, and so underlies all the sciences and arts. 
Assuming the phenomenological attitude, what do 
we find? First of all, that consciousness consists of acts 
directed to objects. But this is only a small part of the 
story. It is characteristic of Husserl’s genius to multi- 
ply and refine distinctions rather than to reduce them 
to systematic unity. Consciousness may be viewed as 
lying between two poles, the ego and the object. On 
the side of the ego lies the subjective attitude with its 
various qualitative forms, such as believing, doubting, 
considering, or willing; and its modes of apprehension, 
such as presentation, representation, or symbolism. On 
the side of the object lies the object itself, and its 
“sense” (Sinn) or ideal character. Midway between 
the two lies the datum or content, such as images or 


210 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


sensory experience. This may all be briefly stated as 
an analysis of the structure of meaning, in which it ap- 
pears: (1) that there must be some one (the ‘“I’’) who 
means it, and who takes (2) a particular kind of mean- 
ingful attitude (theoretical or practical); (3) he must 
have something to mean with (a datum), which embod- 
ies his meaning, and (4) he must take this, or mean 
with it, in a certain way (as a sign or revelation of the 
object); (5) he must mean something, or there must be 
something meant (the sense of his meaning), and (6) 
he must mean this of something (the object). 
Whether this view is to be deemed realistic or idealis- 
tic is largely a matter of emphasis. The analysis of the 
cognitive process contains many realistic suggestions. 
The relation of the subject to the object is essentially 
one of seeing and intending, and implies that the object 
is approached or addressed, rather than constituted, by 
knowledge. Thus the physical object cannot be pre- 
sented except in partial aspects or in perspective, so 
that there is a large element of uncertainty and error in 
perception; but what zs presented is a part of the ob- 
ject, and the residual parts are such as may in turn be 
presented. Universals, on the other hand, can be wholly 
given, in a sort of intellectual vision or intuition of 
essences (Wesenserschauung). Similarly, the certainty 
of phenomenology lies in the fact that it does not 
“intend”? any more than is given. Here even the 
perceptual object may be absolutely known, be- 
cause it is “‘reduced”’ to what is immanent in the 
act of perception. All these considerations suggest 
that objects are both independent of consciousness 


THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 211 


and capable of being more or less adequately brought 
within it. 

On the other hand, Husserl’s growing tendency to 
identify phenomenology and metaphysics is suggestive 
of idealism. For the subject-matter of phenomenology 
is consciousness. In phenomenology all objects of con- 
sciousness assume the character of being objects-of-con- 
sciousness. From this point of view we are compelled 
to say not that the relation of the object to conscious- 
ness is that of being intended or seen—a relation in which 
the object is prior, and into which it may enter with- 
out prejudice to its independence; but that it is of the 
very nature of objects that they should be intended or 
seen, or that the complex operation of conscious ob- 
jectification creates reality in the act of knowing it. 


§ 29. Realism in England and America. Russell. 
Moore. Alexander. Santayana. Whitehead 

BERTRAND RussELu! forms the connecting link be- 
tween Meinong and the realism which emerged on Eng- 
lish soil as a reaction against the sceptical outcome of 
empiricism in Hume, and of intellectualism in Bradley. 
Russell believes that philosophy can be rescued from 
this predicament, and at the same time reconciled with 
science, only by the adoption of a reformed logic. His 
treatment of logic resembles Meinong’s “‘theory of ob- 
jects” (Gegenstandstheorie) in that it provides for a 
realm of entities which are neither physical nor psychi- 


1 Born 1872, and for some years fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 
University. His most important philosophical works are: Critical Ezx- 
position of the Philosophy of Leibniz, 1900; Principles of Mathematics, 
1903; Principia Mathematica (with A. N. Whitehead), 1910-1913; Our 
Knowledge of the External World, 1914; Analysis of Mind, 1921. 


212 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


cal existences—neither things nor thoughts—but which 
may be referred to, meant, and described. The subject- 
matter of mathematics belongs to this realm, and one 
of Russell’s most signal contributions to contemporary 
thought is his unification of logic and mathematics; 
logic borrowing from mathematics its symbolic method, 
and mathematics borrowing from logic its fundamental 
premises.? 

Russell describes his philosophy as a “logical atom- 
ism,” in order to indicate his acceptance of the funda- 
mental multiplicity of things, as revealed in analysis. 
He does not mean that the world is composed of corpo- 
real atoms which are physically divisible from one an- 
other, but of relations, facts, and particular items which 
are distinguishable from one another without losing 
their meaning. Logic itself is atomistic in that it deals 
with propositions,? which are essentially relational in 
structure and hence analyzable into simpler compo- 
nents. As between any two expressions of the same 
logical form the corresponding parts are interchange- 
able. Thus in the proposition “John is mortal,” 
‘‘James”’ may be substituted for “John” without alter- 
ing the meaning of the remainder of the proposition. 


1 Mathematics and logic thus merge into one branch of knowledge, 
which may be called (according to differences of emphasis) ‘‘mathemati- 
cal” or ‘‘symbolic iogic,” or “the philosophy of mathematics.” The 
most important contributions to this branch of knowledge (in addition 
to those of Russell and his collaborator, A. N. Whitehead) have been 
made by G. Boole (1815-1864), G. Frege (b. 1848), G. Peano (b. 1858), 
L. Couturat (1868-1914), E. Schroeder (1841-1902), and C. S. Peirce 
(§ 25). 

2 Or, more precisely, ‘‘propositional functions,” that is, expressions 
containing variables and convertible into propositions by assigning 
values to the variables. Thus ‘‘z is mortal’ is a propositional function, 
while ‘John is mortal” is a proposition. 


THE: REVIVAL OF REALISM 213 


This Russell argues against the view that a proposition 
is an indivisible unity such that if any of it is changed, 
all of it is changed. 

The confusions and contradictions of thought (includ- 
ing the so-called “paradoxes” and “antinomies’’) which 
have brought discredit on the intellect can all be avoided 
by a more scrupulous logic, which recognizes its essen- 
tially relational character, and observes the require- 
ments of logical form. Most of the traditional difficul- 
ties are due to talking nonsense, that is, to combining 
words in ways which grammar permits but which logic 
forbids. Modern mathematics, escaping by the use of 
symbols the confusions arising from language, has al- 
ready cleared up the most important of the traditional 
intellectualistic difficulties, those, namely, connected 
with infinity and continuity. 

The intellect, being thus purified, is capable of pro- 
viding the necessary support to sense-experience. Pure 
empiricism has failed because it has been unable to 
provide nature with order and structure. Attempts 
have been made to remedy this defect by invoking un- 
observable entities behind experience, or the miraculous 
intervention of a synthetic mind. The difficulty is 
escaped if one construes the factual world as consti- 
tuted of systems of particulars: the particulars being 
sensed, the systematic relations logically conceived or 
judged. A fact is known by “description,’’ when it is 
known only by its systematic relations as judged; it is 
known by acquaintance, or in perception, when to this 
knowledge of its logical structure there is added the 
sensible presence of its constituent particulars, 


214 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


Following James, Russell construes the particular ex- 
istences of sense as ground common to the physical and 
the psychical realms. The sense-datum is either physi- 
cal or psychical, according to the causal relations in 
which it is viewed. Hence the physical world, or the 
world of science, is composed of the same stuff as our 
sensory consciousness. Matter and “‘things,”’ and all 
the entities of physical science (such as electrons), are 
only highly complex systems or “constructions”’ of the 
same experiential data which in other types of system- 
atic unity make up minds. The physical object is the 
system of what are commonly called its appearances, 
while a mind is a system of ‘perspectives,’ made up of 
all the appearances from a certain locus when that 
locus is occupied by a brain. Psychology is concerned 
with the particular appearances in their detachment 
from the object to which they belong, in their depen- 
dence on the brain, and in the peculiar kind of causation 
that governs them. The causation characteristic of 
minds Russell refers to as “‘mnemic causation.”’! It 
consists in the function of meaning as dependent on 
past experience, habit, and association. 

Russell’s ethics is divisible into two parts, his exam- 
ination of the traditional problems of moral philosophy, 
and his social creed. The former leads him to an ac- 
ceptance of “intrinsic’’ good and evil, as fundamental 
and irreducible notions, which are bound up with no 
concrete subject-matter, such as pleasure and pain, and 
are independent of existence or non-existence. Moral 


1 Analysis of Mind, ch. IV. The idea is attributed by Russell to R. 
Semon (1859-1918), Die Mneme, 1904 (English trans., 1921). 


THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 215 


values, such as “right” and “wrong”’ attach to actions 
which either produce or are judged to produce the best 
results.!_ Russell’s social creed is individualistic, paci- 
fistic, and pessimistic as regards the existing political 
and economic system.” His general outlook on life is 
one of disillusionment rather than of faith. The accept- 
ance of the teachings of science undermines the com- 
mon religious beliefs, and throws the emancipated mind 
upon its own resources. Renunciation of vulgar hopes 
paves the way to a worshipful contemplation of beauty, 
a proud acceptance of fate, and a courageous loyalty to 
one’s vision of the best.® 


Through all of the numerous representatives of the 
realistic tendency in England and in America there runs 
this same doctrine that knowledge (whether sense-per- 
ception or thought) addresses itself to reality, and at 
some point embraces it, but without compromising its 
independence. G. E. Moore‘ presses the distinction 
between the object (such as the sense-quality) of which 
one is aware, and the act of awareness; insisting that it 
is essentially characteristic of such an act of awareness 
that “its object, when we are aware of it, is precisely 


1‘*The Elements of Ethics,” in Philosophical Essays, 1910. 

2 Proposed Roads to Freedom, 1919. 

8 “The Free Man’s Worship,” in Philosophical Essays, 1910. 

4A highly analytical and critical thinker, born in 1873, and professor 
of mental philosophy in the University of Cambridge. Cf. his ‘‘Refu- 
tation of Idealism,” published together with other essays in his Philo- 
sophical Studies, 1922. The writer who stands closest to Moore, in 
method as well as in doctrine, is C. D. Broad (Perception, Physics, and 
Reality, 1914; Scientific Thought, 1923; The Mind and Its Place in 
Nature, 1925). Cf. also J. Laird, Problems of the Self, 1917; and A Study 
in Realism, 1920. 


216 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


what it would be, if we were not aware.” ! S. ALEXAN- 
DER? construes knowledge as an act of contemplation 
whose object is ‘‘compresent,”’ the act itself being ex- 
perienced immediately or ‘‘enjoyed.’’ American real- 
ists fall, for the most part, into one or the other of two 
groups, known as “‘neo-realists”’ and “critical realists.”’ 
The former group has argued for the immediate pres- 
ence both of physical existence in perception and of 
logical (or mathematical) subsistence in thought. The 
latter group, represented most conspicuously by G. 
SANTAYANA,‘ has distinguished between the general na- 
tures or ‘‘essences”’ which are immediately given, and 
the transcendent “existences” to which these are re- 
ferred. According to this view, all that one can directly 


1QOp. cit., p. 29. 

2 Born in 1859, and until recently professor of philosophy in the Uni- 
versity of Manchester. A long interval separates Alexander’s earlier 
work on the ethics of evolution (Moral Order and Progress, 1889) from 
his recent realism. He is notable among the exponents of realism for 
his constructive, metaphysical interest. Cf. his Space, Time and Deity, 
1920. 

8’ Hach of these schools has published a co-operative volume, the 
former The New Realism (1912), by E. B. Holt, W. T. Marvin, W. P. 
Montague, R. B. Perry, W. B. Pitkin, and E. G. Spaulding; the latter © 
Essays in Critical Realism (1920) by D. Drake, A. O. Lovejoy, J. B. 
Pratt, A. K. Rogers, G. Santayana, R. W. Sellars, and C. A. Strong. 

The more important systematic works of these writers are: Holt, 
Concept of Consciousness, 1914; Montague, The Ways of Knowing, 1925; 
Perry, General Theory of Value, 1926; Spaulding, The New Rationalism, 
1918; Drake, Mind and Its Place in Nature, 1925; Pratt, The Religious 
Consciousness, 1921, and Matter and Spirit, 1922 ; Sellars, Critical Real- 
ism, 1916, and Evolutionary Naturalism, 1922; Strong, Why the Mind 
Has a Body, 1903, and A Theory of Knowledge, 1923. For Santayana, cf. 
below. {An allied view, combining realism and pragmatism, and meta- 
physical in its emphasis, is to be found in J. E. Boodin’s A Realistic 
Universe, 1916. 

4 Born in Madrid in 1863 of Spanish parentage, long resident in Amer- 
ica as professor of philosophy in Harvard University, and at present 
living in Europe. Cf. his Life of Reason, 1905; and Scepticism and Ani- 
mal Faith, 1923. 


THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 217 


grasp in intuition is what the object is, if there is such 
an object; while whether there is such an object or not 
can only be taken on “faith,” or pragmatically. Both 
of these groups affirm that there is knowledge of an 
extramental reality, and that at least the character of 
this reality is envisaged in our conscious experience. 

While all contemporary realists agree that in cogni- 
tion the mind somehow apprehends reality rather than 
constitutes it, there are wide differences of opinion as to 
the nature of mind. At least three views are distin- 
guishable. Moore, like Meinong and Husserl, is dis- 
posed to construe mind in terms of acts having a unique 
and irreducible character of intentional awareness. 
Others! are disposed to agree with James in construing 
mind as a peculiar type of relatzonship (such as ‘‘mean- 
ing”) whose terms are the same as those which, when 
otherwise related, compose the physical world. A third 
group, including Alexander and the American neo-real- 
ists, conceive mind in terms of the activities of an or- 
ganism endowed with a nervous system, while calling 
attention to the fact that these activities lie upon a 
different plane from that which is ordinarily dealt with 
in physiology and biology. 

Realism is disposed to a metaphysical “pluralism” 3 
through emphasis on the category of relation, whether 


1Cf. F. J. E. Woodbridge, ‘‘ Nature of Consciousness,” Jour. of Phi- 
los., vol. II, 1905. 

2 This view is closely related to the contemporary psychological move- 
ment known as “behaviorism,” according to which the mind is what, in 
its higher and more complex developments, the body does. Russell’s view 
may be said to be a combination of this view with the “‘relational”’ view. 

3 Realists like Meinong, and Husserl in his earlier stages of develop- 
ment, represent a tendency in realism to avoid metaphysics, in a man- 

ner analogous to the “critical”? method in idealism. 


218 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


of the empirical or logical variety. Materialism and 
spiritualism tend to a monism of substance; idealism, to 
a monism of the cognitive act, or to the embracing of 
all reality within a single knowing mind. But through 
the realistic conception of relations, the differences of 
the world may compose an orderly structure without 
becoming inseparably one. Otherwise, realism is di- 
vided, in respect of metaphysics, between a tendency 
to “neutralism’’ and a tendency to naturalism. By the 
former is meant the view that reality cannot properly 
be characterized either in physical or in mental terms, 
but only in more primitive terms which underlie this 
distinction. Thus sense-qualities and relations, for ex- 
ample, are regarded as intrinsically neither physical 
nor mental, but as possessing a character common to 
these two realms. The naturalistic tendency, on the 
other hand, arises from the view that while, as regards 
their composition as revealed in analysis, physical and 
mental reality are both secondary, the order and his- 
tory of existence are determined by physical laws, so 
that mind can be said to be a product of physical na- 
ture. This does not, however,! mean that mind is a 
product of ponderable matter, or of “‘merely’’ mechan- 
ical causes; for physical nature, as reinterpreted in 
terms of the content of perception and thought, as- 
sumes a character which reduces its difference from 
mind to one of degree rather than of kind. Alexander 
and others? maintain that an emergence of purposiveness 


1 Except in the case of Santayana, who inclines to a materialistic view 
of existence and a mechanical view of causation. 

2 Cf. Lloyd Morgan (§ 13) and L. T. Hobhouse, Development and Pur- 
pose, 1923. 


THE REVIVAL OF REALISM 219 


in life and mind is entirely consistent with a physico- 
chemical view of the lower levels of nature; while Alex- 
ander, Russell, and A. N. Wurireneap,! influenced by 
the current theory of relativity, conceive physical na- 
ture in terms of ‘‘events”’ occurring in “space-time,” 
and thus relieve it of that aspect of inertness in which 
it once appeared as the very antithesis of mind. 

As regards their practical philosophy, there is no 
agreement among contemporary realists, although 
their disagreements illuminate their realistic premises. 
Somewhat similar to Meinong’s view of value as an 
“objective,” is Santayana’s view that value attaches 
to ‘‘essences”’ rather than to either physical or psychi- 
cal existences. Values are immediably objective, but 
to mistake them for existences is to suffer illusion: to 
enjoy them one must intuit them without imputing 
existence to them. Moore, on the other hand, regards 
value (“intrinsic goodness’’) as an indefinable quality, 
which attaches to existent objects in the same sense 
as the color “yellow”; while Alexander and the Amer- 
ican neo-realists incline to the view that value is 
a psychological character, which the object acquires 
only by relation to the liking or aversion of a sentient 
subject. | 

The most complete metaphysical system thus far 
produced by Anglo-American realism is to be found in 
the Space, Time and Deity of Alexander. With the ex- 


1 Born 1861; sometime professor of applied mathematics at the Im- 
perial College of Science, London, and since 1924 professor of philosophy 
in Harvard University. His principal philosophical works are: An In- 
quiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, 1919; The Con- 
cept of Nature, 1920; Science and the Modern World, 1925. 


220 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


ception of Whitehead,' Alexander alone has formulated 
a definite and original theology. Deity, according to 
this writer, is to be defined in terms of the princi- 
ple of emergence, according to which nature rises to 
successively higher and superimposed levels. Although 
the human mind is thus far pre-eminent, the principle 
of emergence implies higher levels beyond, which will 
be related to the human mind as this in turn is related 
to the body. Deity is this prospective superiority 
viewed from below, and God is the supreme eminence 
or infinite deity, viewed with reverent expectancy by 
man. 

Most contemporary realists are “realistic” in the 
practical and popular sense, that is, they reject the 
view commonly held by idealists, that the fulfilment — 
of human aspirations is a universal condition of ex- 
istence. This idealistic thesis is based on the assump- 
tion that reality of every type arises from an act of 
mind, and is supported by the argument that since 
mind is essentially purposive or directed to the good, 
reality as the creation of mind will necessarily be an 
embodiment of perfection. Realism denies both the 
assumption and the argument. The nature of the 
world is judged by facts rather than by ideals. But 
though the world is not necessarily good, neither is ‘it 
necessarily evil or indifferent to good. The degree of 
its goodness is a question of experience, or of faith 
translated into endeavor. 


1 Whitehead’s conception of God is briefly stated in his Science“and 
the Modern World, ch. XI. 


CONCLUSION 
§ 30. Tendencies of the Immediate Present 


At the opening of the present century realism was 
sufficiently extended and developed to justify its being 
ranked among the major currents of modern philosophy. 
A survey of contemporary European and American phi- 
losophy thus reveals four strands: naturalism, both ma- 
terialistic and positivistic; idealism and spiritualism; 
pragmatism, voluntarism, and vitalism; and realism. 
Though these strands are interwoven and interpene- 
trating, they can nevertheless be unmistakably dis- 
tinguished as having each a characteristic color of its 
own. 

There are evident signs that these distinctions, al- 
though useful for the purpose of the delineation of the 
philosophy of the recent past, may soon be outgrown. 
It is possible that philosophy is now nearing the close 
of a great phase that began with Descartes, and that 
what it has been customary to term “modern” as dis- 
tinguished from “medieval” and ‘ancient’ philoso- 
phy, will soon cease to be modern. The philosophy of 
the present is difficult to characterize for the very rea- 
son that the traditional vocabulary begins to be anti- 
quated, while no new vocabulary has as yet come into 
general vogue. How shall one characterize the fading 
out of certain distinctions in terms which were designed 
to accentuate these very distinctions? “Naturalism,” 


“idealism,” “pragmatism,” and “realism,” together 
221 


222 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


with many of the subordinate terms of each of these 
major philosophical parties, already suggest the battle- 
cries of a war that is over, and that has ended in a 
““peace without victory.” 
- Naturalism has ceased to wage war upon religion, 
and idealism has thus lost its réle as the protector of 
the faith. All philosophies have acquired so great a 
respect for science, both for its method and for the 
reality of the physical world which it depicts, that there 
is no longer any occasion for a militant naturalism that 
shall provide science with a philosophical defense. 
Similarly, idealism has so far repudiated its subjectivis- 
tic origins that the realist, in insisting upon the inde- 
pendent real, has difficulty in finding any one to dis- 
agree with him. At the same time, the pragmatist’s 
contention that mind exercises choice, or that thought 
is governed by purposes and related to the needs of 
life, is accepted by idealists and realists alike, and 
proclaimed by all schools of scientific thought. 
Perhaps it would be fair to say that there is to-day 
in all quarters a declining disposition to insist on the 
exclusive truth of any doctrine, or to argue its negative 
implications. This may be ascribed in part to the grow- 
ing interest in common problems, and in part to an 
increased faith in the possibility of somehow conserving 
and reconciling the great insights. Along with this 
spirit of co-operation and conciliation, there is a ten- 
dency to reject externality and transcendence, and to 
think in terms of what is called “experience.” It may 
be that the vogue of this term means nothing more 
than the belief that philosophy rightly begins with 


CONCLUSION 223 


data, and that data must be generally acceptable and 
capable of affording both a common point of depar- 
ture and a common court of appeal. In any case, it 
is a notable fact that idealism in all its manifesta- 
tions, whether the neo-Hegelianism, neo-Fichteanism, 
and neo-Romanticism of Italy and Germany, the neo- 
Kantianism of Germany and France, or the personal 
idealism of England and America, has less to say about 
the Absolute and more to say about the observable 
processes of nature, life, society, and history; so much 
so, that idealists can now scarcely deny their kinship 
even with the empiricists and pragmatists whom they 
once despised. Not. less notable is the tendency in 
naturalistic circles to conceive the physical world, not 
as a reality behind the scenes which is known only 
by inference from its phenomenal appearances, but as 
a system of these appearances; which now cease to 
be “appearances” in the old sense, and become them- 
selves the very substance and tissue of nature. Simi- 
larly, realism is no longer the affirmation of a thing-in- 
itself, adopted asa refuge from the supposed subjectivity 
of what is immediately known, but has become the 
doctrine that the immediately known is itself a genuine 
aspect of the independent reality. 

Whether this philosophical spirit of the times marks 
the beginning of an era of eclecticism, or an intellectual 
war-weariness following the polemics of the nineteenth 
century, or the lull before a new storm of constructive 
speculation, no man can at this hour confidently predict. 


SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 


GENERAL WORKS ON THE History OF RECENT PHILOSOPHY 


(* Recommended for Beginners) 


AuioTtTa, A.: Idealistic Reaction against Science, 1914. 
Comprehensive critical review of recent tendencies and 
authors. 

Aurotta, A.: Il nuovo realismo in Inghilterra e in America, 
1915. 

BosaANqueEt, B.: The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary 
Philosophy, 1921. On relations of neo-realism and neo- 
idealism. 

Gunn, J. A.: Modern French Philosophy, 1922. 

Hoérrpinc, H.: History of Modern Philosophy (English 
trans.), 1908, vol. II. European philosophy from Kant 
to 1880. 

*HOrrpinc, H.: Modern Philosophers, 1915. Bradley, Euck- 
en, Boutroux, Mach, Nietzsche, James. 

Hoernuf, R. F. A.: Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics, 
1920. Criticisms of naturalism and realism. 

Hovtin, A.: Histoire du Modernisme Catholique, 1913. 

*Joap, A. E. M.: Introduction to Modern Philosophy, 1924. 
Russell, James, Bergson, Croce, Gentile. 

Krémer, R.: Le Néo-réalisme américain, 1920. 

*Kttren, O.: Philosophy of the Present in Germany, 1918. 
Mach, Haeckel, Nietzsche, Fechner, Lotze, von Hart- 
mann, Wundt. 

Merz, J. T.: History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 
Century, 1903. Best available account of the history of 
science for the period covered. 

Moos, W.: Die deutsche Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1922. 

*MULLER-FREIENFELS, R.: Die Philosophie des 20. Jahrhun- 
derts in thren Hauptstromungen, 1923. Present tenden- — 
cies in Germany. 

224 


SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 225 


Murruead, J. H.: Contemporary British Philosophy. Per- 
sonal Statements. First Series, 1924. Second Series, 1926. 
Bosanquet, Broad, Hobhouse, Laird, Mackenzie, Mc- 
Taggart, Lloyd Morgan, Muirhead, Russell, Schiller, 
Ward, Hicks, Hoernlé, Moore, Smith, Taylor, Thomson. 

Paropt, D.: La Philosophie contemporaine en France, 1920. 
French philosophy from 1860 to the present. 

Perrier, J. L.: The Revival of Scholastic Philosophy in the 
Nineteenth Century, 1909. 

*Pourry, R. B.: Present Conflicts of Ideals, 1918. Present ten- 
dencies in their moral, political, and social applications. 

Perry, R. B.: Present Philosophical Tendencies, 1912. Criti- 
cal review of naturalism, idealism, pragmatism, and 
realism. 

Piccou, R.: Benedetto Croce, 1922. Recent Italian philoso- 
phy. 

*Ritgy, J. W.: American Thought, 1923. Royce, Dewey, 
James, realism. 

Roaesrs, A. K.: English and American Philosophy since 1800, 
1923. 

Ruaerero, G. DE: Modern Philosophy, 1921. German, 
French, Anglo-American, and Italian philosophy since 
1860, selected and estimated from the standpoint of the 
Italian idealistic school. 

SANTAYANA, G.: Egotism in German Philosophy. Nietzsche 
and other German tendencies. 

*SANTAYANA, G.: Winds of Doctrine, 1913. Bergson, Rus- 
sell, American philosophy. 

ScHJELDERUP, H. K.: Hauptlinien der Entwicklung der Philo- 
sophie von Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart, 
1920. European and American philosophy from 1860 
through James. 

Scumipt, R., Editor: Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbst- 
darstellungen. Five vols., 1922-1924. Becher, Driesch, 
Meinong, Natorp, Rehmke, Volkelt, Cornelius, Troeltsch, 
Vaihinger, Croce, Hoffding, Ostwald, Keyserling. 


226 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST 


Sincuair, E.: The New Idealism, 1922. Critical summaries 
of Alexander and other British and American realists. 

Stespine, L. 8.: Pragmatism and French Voluntarism, 1914. 
Renouvier, Ravaisson, Boutroux, Bergson. 

Wau, J.: The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America, 
1925. Bradley, Royce, Fechner, Lotze, Renouvier, 
James, Russell, American realists. 

Waritruean, A. N.: Science and the Modern World, 1925. 
Philosophical significance of recent developments in 
science. 


INDEX 


Abbott, C. G., 77 

Agassiz, J. L. RS 16, 187 
Alexander, 8., 216, 217, 219, 220 
Ampére, A. M., 10, 11 

Apollo, 170 

Aquinas, T., 9, 200, 201-204 
Ardig6, 

Aristotle, 7, 26, 27, 82, 200, 206 
Avenarius, ae: 63, 65 

Azarias, Brother, 203 


Baeumker, C., 203 

Bain, A., 13 

Bauer, B., 3 

Becher, E., 206 

Bentham, igh 53, 57, 58 

Bergson, H, 113, 174-182, 186, 
193 


Berkeley, 65 

Bernard, C., 11, 108 

Berthelot, P. E. M., 11 

Blondel, M., 174, 183 

Bonald, L. G. A. de, 11 

Boodin, J. E., 216 

Boole, G., 212 

Bosanquet, B., 135 

_Bossuet, 201 

Boutraux, E., 109-111 

Bowne, B. P., 144, 145 

Bradley, F. H., 15, 130-135, 137 

Brentano, F., 306 

Broad, C. D., 215 

Brockmeyer, H. C., 18 

Brunschvicg, L., 125 

Biichner, L., 6, 31, 38, 42 

Buckle, H. J., 12 

Buffon, Count de, see G, L. Le- 
clerc . 


Cabanis, fi * 97, 100, 101 
Caird, E., 


Carlyle, T., 15, 17, 54 
Carr, H 167 


Cassirer, E., 147° 

Clifford, W. K., 13, 191 

Cohen, Hermann, 147-151 

Colding, 6 

Coleridge, 8S. T., 15, 17, 54 

Collard R., 11, 105 

Comte, A., 8, 10, 12, 18, 16, 30, 
43-52, 54, 72 

Condillac, E. T., 97, 104 

Cornelius, H., 63 

Cournot, A. K. 12, 45 

Cousin, V., i 12, 18, 103-107, 202 

Couturat, pv 

Creighton, J. i 145 

Croce, B., 160-166 

Cumberland, R., 53 

Cuvier, G., 10, 16, 26 

Czolbe, H., 6 


Dana, J. D., 17 

Darwin, C., "6, 10, 14, 16, 17, 20- 
29, 171 

Darwin, E., 20 

Darwin, F., 26 

Davidson, T., 143 

Davy, H., 


De Sanctis, F., 161 
tr eeebed ay 77, 78, 80, 101, 104, 


Deu P., 94 

Dewey, J., 97, 194, 195 
Dilthey, W., 155-159 
Dionysus, 170, 171 
Drake, D., 216 

Draper, J. W., 16 
Driesch, H., 169 

Dubois Reymond, E., 39 
Duhem, ee e 

Diihring, 

Dore. be 44, 71-75 


Ehrenfels, C. von, 208 
Emerson, R. W., 17 
Espinas, A., 72 

Eucken, R., 158, 159, 160 
Euclid, 69, 70 


227 


228 


Faraday, M., 13 

Farges, A., 203 

Fechner, G. T., 7, 48, 61, 82-86, 
193 

Ferrari, G., 8 

Feuerbach, L., 3, 4 

Fichte, I., 7. 81, '92, 99, 154, 158 

Fischer, K. P., vf: 151 

Fiske, J sa We 

Fogazzaro, A., 183 

Fouillée, A., 113 

Fourier, C., 9 

Franchi, A., 8 

Frauenstadt, J., 94 

Frege, G., 212 


Galileo, G., 5 

Gallupi, P., 8 

Gemelli, A., 203 

Gentile, G., 166, 167 

Germain, S., 45 

Gibbs, J. W., 16 

Gilson, E., 203 

Gioberti, V., 8 

Gobineau, J. A., comte de, 72 

Grabmann, M., 203 

Gray, A., 17 

Green, T. H. , 15, 57, 126-129, 130, 
131 


Grose, T. H., 126 
Guyau, J. M., 113 


Haeckel, E., 6, 31, 38-43, 44 
Hall, G. S., 83 
Hamelin, ah 120 
ashen W., 15, 31, 32, 54, 59 
Harper, T , 203 
Harris, W. T. 18 
Harrison, F., 45 
Hartmann, E. Ue aren 
Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 4 
94-96, 121, 130, "137, 162, 165 
Helmholz, HL. von, 5, 83 
Henry, J., 16 
Herder, J. G., 21 
Herschel, J. F. W., 53 
Hertz, H., 63 
Hobhouse, L. T., 218 
Hocking, W. E., 145 
Hoffding, H., 206 
Hoernlé, R. F. A., 135 
Holt, E. B., 216 
Howison, G. H., 18, 187, 141-148 
Hiigel, F, von, 183 


INDEX 


Hume, D., 15, 32, 53, 65, 97, 105, 
110, 115, 122, 126, 127 

Husserl, E, 208-211, 217 

Hutton, Fat 14 

Huxley, T. H., 14, 28 


James, AE 57, 83, 186-194, 206, 
214, 2 17. 

Janet, P., 11 

Joule, qf P., 5, 13 

Jouffroy, T. S., 11 


Kant, L., 1, 4-7, 12, 15, 17, 18, 34, 
51, 61-63, 81, 98, 99, 105, 111, 
114, 115, 116-119, 122, 126-128, 
142, 145-148, 151, 154, 160, 200, 
205 


Kelvin, Lord, 13 
Keyserling, H. von, 157 
Kierkegaard, 8., 206 
Kirchhoff, G., 63 
Kilpe, O., 205 


Lachelier, J., 121- 125 
Ladd, G. T., 83 

Laird, J., 215 

Lamarck, J. B. de, 10, 20, 21, 24 
Lange, ie 4, 44, 60-64 
Laplace, P. 8. de, 10 
Lavoisier, A. L., 5 

Le Bon, G., 72 

Leclerc, G. L., 21 

Le Conte, J., 17, 137 
Leibniz, G. W. von, 1, 7, 82: 
Leo XIII, 202 

Le Roy, E. cy Loe 
Lévy-Bruhl, es Ri 73, 74 


_ Lewes, G. H., 
. Liebmann, O., "4 


Linnzus, C., 26 

Littré, M. P. E., 10, 45 

Lobatchewsky, N. I., 69 

Locke, J., 16, 32, 104 

Loisy, A., 183 

Lotze, R. H., 12, 62, 88, 85-94, 
145, 151 

Lovejoy, A. O., 216 

Lyell, C., 14, 30 


Mach, E., 27, 42, 44, 64-67 
Mackenzie, J. 8., 135 
pee de Biran, 11, 100-103, 106, 


INDEX 


Maistre, J. de, 11 

Malthus, T. R., 23 
Mamiani,4T., 8 

Mansel, H. L., 15, 31, 59 
Marvin, W. T., 216 

Marx, K., 3, 29 

Maxwell, J. C., 13, 63 

Mayer, J. R., 

McCosh, J., 17 

McTaggart, J. Mt E., 143 
Mead, G. H., 194 

Meinong, A., ” 206-208, 211, 217 
Mercier, D., 203 

Meyerson, E. 125 

Mezes, S. E., 187 

Milhaud, G., 67 

Mill, James, 13, 53 

Mill, Hee 13, 16, 44, 45, 47, 52- 


Moleschott, a8 6, 38 

Monet, J. B. P . de, see Lamarck 
Montague, W. P., 2 

Moore, A. W., 195 

Moore, G. E., 215, 217, 219 
Morgan, C. L., 80, 218 
Muirhead, J. H., 135 
Miinsterberg, H., 153 

Murri, R., 183 


Natorp, P., 147-151 

Newton, I., 5, 19, 69 

Nietzsche, F., 28, 94, 113, 169- 
174, 182 


Olgiati, F., 203 
Ostwald, W., 42 
Owen, R., 9 


Pasteur, L., 11 
Peano, G., 212 
Pearson, K., 28, 63 
Peirce, C. 8., 189, 212 


Pitkin, W. B., 216 

Plato, 8, 27, 150 

Poincaré, H., 44, 67-71, 183 
Porter, N., 17 

Pratt, J. B., 216 
Pringle-Pattison, A. 8., 143 
Proudhon, P. J., 9° 


229 


Ravaisson-Mollien, F., 12, 106-112 

Reid, 11, 32, 105, 10 

Reinke, J., 169 

Renan, E., 10, 45 

Renouvier, C., 12, 113-121, 191 

Ricardo, D., 54. 

Rickaby, J., "202, 203 

Rickert, HH 153-155 

Riemann, G. R. B., 69 

Ritschl, A., 62, 93, 145 

Rogers, A. K., 216 

Romanes, G. J., 14 

Rosmini-Serbati, A., 8, 202 

Rousseau, J. J., 99, 100 

Rouvroy, C. H. de, see Saint- 
Simon 

Royce, J., 18, 1386-141, 145, 189 

Ruge, A., 3 

Russell, B., 77, 80, 211-215, 217 


Sabatier, P., 184, 186 

Saint-Simon, 9, 45 

Sanseverino, C., 9, 202 

Santayana, G., 216, 218, 219 

Schelling, F. W. von, 7, 11, 82, 99, 
103, 106 

Schiller, F. C. S., 195 

Schlegel, F., 99, 202 

Schleiermacher, F. D., 81 

Schmidt, C., 3 

Schopenhauer, A., 1, 7, 81, 94, 95, 
96, 169, 170 

Schroeder, E., 212 

Secrétan, C., 106 - 

Sellars, R. W., 216 

Semon, R., 214 

Shapley, H., 77 

Sheldon, W. H., 145 

Simmel, G., 159, 160 

Smith, A., 54 

Smith, J. A., 167 

Spaulding, E. G., 216 

Spaventa, B., 9 

Spencer, H., 10, 14, 15, 17, 24, 28, 
29-37, 38-42, 44, 75 

Spinoza, B., 84 

Spranger, E., 157 

Stirling, J. H., 15, 126 

Stirner, M., see Schmidt, C. 

Strauss, D., 3, 4, 10 

Strong, C. A., 216 

Stuart, H. W., 195 

Suarez, 201 


230 INDEX 


Taine, H. A., 10, 45’ Vico, G. B., 8, 161 
Tarde, G., 72 Vogt, K., 6 
Taylor, A. E., 135 Volkelt, H., 206 
Thomas Aquinas, see Aquinas, T. 
Thomson, J. A., 80 Wagner, R., 94, 169, 170 
Titchener, E. B., 83 Walker, L. J., 2038, 205 
Tracy, D. de, 9, 97, 100, 101 Wallace, A. R., 14, 23 
Trendelenburg, A., 81 Ward, J., 143 
Troltsch, E., 157 Weber, E. H., 82, 85 
Tufts, J. H., 194 Weber, M., 153 
Turner, W., 203 Weisse, C. H., 7 
Tyndall, J., 14 Weissmann, A., 24, 37 
Tyrrell, G., 183, 184 Whewell, W., 53 
Whitehead, A. N., 80, 211, 212, 
Urban, W. M., 208 219, 220 
Windelband, W., 151-153 
Vacherot, E., 10 Witherspoon, J., 17 
Vaihinger, H., 195 Woodbridge, F. J. E., 217 
Vera, A., 9 Wulf, M. de, 203 


Verworn, M., 63 Wundt, W., 83 


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